Welcome to Our City Homestead!!
We are so glad you’re here!!
Welcome to Our City Homestead. Before I share more about what we are all about, let me first tell you how this all came to be. I have always had a passion for old fashioned things and pioneer life of the 1800’s. It has been something that has interested me since I was a child and first learned about it all in school when I was 8 years old. I loved learning how to make leather bookmarks, how a newspaper was printed and how to make pulled taffy. I loved learning how to make a quilt and how cooking was done much differently back then. As time went by, my love for history grew. I wanted to learn more about what I could make myself and how I needed to do it. I began cooking more simply with real, whole foods as opposed to boxed items. I began canning and preserving more. I began reading about gardening and homesteading and how pioneers lived. I began looking at things as, “if gramma ate it, then so can I. If she didn’t, neither should I.” I thought about the practical skills pioneers had and how I wanted my children to know about hard work and determination, how to cook if the power went out, how to garden and be more sustainable. We enjoyed our trips to Fort Edmonton Park and the John Walter Museum and my children’s passion for this way of life grew too.
When the pandemic began in early 2020 and caused grocery stores to run out of essential items when people panicked, the idea of Our City Homestead was sparked from conversations I had with others. A lot of people I talked to had wished they knew how to garden, but they lived in the city and thought they simply could not. Or they wished they knew how to cook and bake from scratch, our how to make bread without yeast, but they did not know where to begin. I also heard how they would love to cook with limited ingredients because they could not get to the grocery store, but still feed a hungry family. I heard them say that they wish they learned sewing from their grandmother or a fun skill to do when they were bored at home like embroidery, crocheting or knitting and projects of the sort.
And that is when it hit me — why not share my love of the very things that people were telling me they wished they had known! And Our City Homestead came to be.
We really are fascinated with the “simple” life of the early pioneers, though their life was anything but simple. They were really actually very hard working. The women devoted their time to the running of the household, spending hours stoking the fire and preparing hearty meals for their family, washing dishes, tending to the children, working in the garden, drying and preserving vegetables, fruits and herbs in the fall, milking the cow, separating the cream and churning butter, picking the eggs and feeding the chickens, making soap and candles, ironing by heating the iron on the wood stove and then gently pressing onto their clothing being careful as to not put soot on their clean clothes. Then there was sewing and mending plus the task of washing clothes by first heating the water then scrubbing the exceptionally dirty clothing along the washboard often using homemade soap. They would sew their family’s clothing, often by hand, from beautiful calico fabrics for themselves and the girls and muted tones for the men and boys that they purchased from the general store. It was hard tedious work. Not only did the women and girls do all of this hard work, the women also got water, helped salt and preserve meat when fish were caught or an animal was butchered in the fall, make cheese and even weave hats out of the straw that was left from the crops. The women also knitted, did needlepoint or embroidery and quilted in their spare time. Often quilting bees helped them complete quilts a lot quicker as they took turns at each other’s homes having tea and something to munch on while quilting, sharing recipes and visiting with each other. It was a social outing that yielded a beautiful hand sewn quilt which would help them keep warm in the blistering cold months ahead.
The men had their hard and laborious jobs as well like tending to the livestock, working the fields by hand using primitive tools of the day or with a horse and planting crops, often walking miles to seed by hand as well as chopping wood, clearing land, building furniture, tending to livestock, trapping for furs, fishing, hunting and butchering. The men were responsible for building the homes and barns and often had barn-raising bees to make the work go quicker. “Many hands make light work,” as they say. In the evenings, they would clean their guns and prepare them for the next time they needed it, make bullets from melting lead and pouring it into a special mold, play the fiddle or other instrument, whittle wood into beautiful objects like shelves or whistles and tell stories to the children.
I admire the pioneers at what they were able to accomplish without the luxuries we have today of running water and power and machine-run everything! We flick on a switch, touch a button or turn the tap and we have hot water, an appliance that washes our dishes, a furnace to heat our home, lights and a gas or electric stove or microwave or an assortment of appliances that cook our food. Even though we have all these things that should make our life more simple, it seems we have complicated our day-to-day lives. That’s what I love about the pioneers — they kept their faith and hope, worked together and reaped the benefits of their hard work. All of this hard work yielded a strong, loving family, yummy goodies from the garden and deliciously simple meals on the table each day.
We live in the city. Even though we do not have a country homestead (yet!), there are still things we can do to bring a bit of the farmhouse country into the city — and that is what we are here to share!
Living in unbelievable times such as these with the pandemic of this nasty virus running rampant through countries causing the shut down of businesses has reminded me of the importance of living simply and as sustainably as we can! I see all the potential in doing so while being neighborly and creating a community much the same as the pioneers did. The more we can provide for ourselves, the less stressful it will be for us, the more prepared we will be, the more confident we are and the more we will be at peace with situations thrown at us, not to mentions taking some of the strain off of our huge reliance on such necessities as grocery stores, retail stores, restaurants, coffee shops and even take-out. It is important to my family that we head back to our roots and live a more simple lifestyle – even in the city!!
Here at Our City Homestead, we will be sharing recipes from our kitchen including various hearty and delicious meals, simple desserts and tasty beverages. We will be sharing easy and fun crafting ideas including some old fashioned inspired crafts, that children (and adults alike) will love while we use a variety of materials. We will also be sharing our gardening triumphs and mishaps and our favourite ways to preserve our garden harvest like making jam and pickles! We are taking what we heard others “wishing” they knew and making it something they are “glad” to learn.
Welcome to Our City Homestead. It’s a taste of farmhouse country, in the middle of the city!!!
enjoy from Our City Homestead to yours