Homestead Opinions Featured in New Online Article

The Zeiger Family Homestead appears in a new online article, Fulfilling a Dream: Living off the Land on the Ruple Properties blog.

Their hope is that the article will encourage people to start thinking about how they, too, could make our type of lifestyle a reality.

They plan this to be the first in a series of posts regarding using one’s land for something other than just “mowing your lawn.”

The post, which you can read on their site, profiles some very interesting people who are “homesteading” on a little or a lot of land. The articles great, and the sites these other people maintain are well worth visiting.

We and other respondents to the company’s request answered 4 questions:

  1. What inspired you to begin homesteading and living more self sufficiently?
  2. Why do you feel this lifestyle is important?
  3. What would you say to someone who might be thinking about or is interested in making this type of lifestyle change, but is still somewhat unsure?
  4. If someone wanted to begin, what is the first thing you would tell them to do/try? Or one thing that would make for an “easy start?”

The similarity between my answers to these questions, and the responses of the other correspondents, intrigued me. Each of the families profiled in the article represent wide variations in the “homesteading”/self-sufficient living field, yet we’re rather cohesive in our reasons for doing it, and our advice to others who would seek to follow our examples.

My definitive response to these questions and other similar ones are well covered in my book Sacred Coffee: A “Homesteader’s” Paradigm, but I appreciated the chance to distill that material into briefer summaries. I’m looking forward to reading more posts in the series from Ruple Properties.

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2 Responses to Homestead Opinions Featured in New Online Article

  1. Linn Hartman says:

    Back in the early 70’s our area was a meca for folks wanting to get back to basics. They would come here on vacation see the layed back lifestyle and folks playing music around the courthouse square and think that was for them. Many would go back home sell what they had, come back and buy some little 40 acre rock farm and think they were going to make a living – some made it and are here today, but most ended it up selling out and going back where they came from – 18 months was a good average -those 40 acre places were the best cash crop the locals had – today it’s retired folks, but they bring their money with them and those rocky tops go for big bucks-My wife’s family moved here in the 1840’s and we moved back to her 40 when I retired in 2003. They still play music on the square, but for the most part its vacationers and not the old locals and the land is still pretty hard to scratch out a living.

  2. Mark Zeiger says:

    Linn, that’s very similar to what goes on here in Alaska. Unfortunately, we have the added expense of being remote, so if a family fails, they still have to pay a lot to get back to where they came from.

    As with any human endeavor, most (not to say all) of the success depends on the people making the effort.

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