Introducing: Frugal Urban Homesteader

Our family of 4 lives in a small city. As the adults have grown older we’ve gained a lot of appreciation for the value of products, not the purchase price or quantity, as well as gaining a desire to do more on our own in order to control our own destiny. As we learn and expand our skills in new areas we often find some our questions are difficult to find answers for that are close to our own circumstances including, location, motivation, abilities, budget, etc… For this reason we thought it would be helpful to share our perspective hoping it can help others be comfortable with trying these things on their own and to accelerate their own learning curve in doing so.

Frugal: economical in use or expenditure; prudently saving or sparing; not wasteful.

For us frugal does not mean being cheap or stingy and not buying things at all. Rather when buying things we very carefully evaluate what we want it to do, how we will use it and determine which of the items offers us the most value for our intended purpose. It would be cheap to only look at the upfront purchase price, but our goal is to get the item with the best value; or to say it differently which has the lowest lifetime cost.

Urban: of, relating to, or designating a city or town

We live in a small neighborhood with a fenced in back yard inside of a small city. Although we cannot relate to apartment or condo dwellers, much of the US population lives in a similar situation to ours. Conversely we do not have several acres of land and a wooded area to take advantage of, so planning and efficient execution of our goals with these constraints is important.

Homesteading: is a lifestyle of self-sufficiency. It is characterized by subsistence agriculture, home preservation of food, and may also involve the small scale production of textiles, clothing, and craft work for household use or sale.

In addition to carefully selecting items that we purchase based on value, we have also looked for ways to do many more things on our own rather than purchasing. This includes things like building, gardening, and most recently backyard chicken raising. Doing these things increases our families skills at a variety of tasks at the same time as gaining control over more of our lives.

As we launch this blog we have more experience with some things than others and intend to share our learning process with you. The most defined areas we will share about will likely be:

• Backyard chickenkeeping
• Small gardening
• Composting
• Frugal / sustainable homemaking