The Bad Days

Many people decide to start homesteading because of the beautiful bucolic images of the countryside and animals grazing on green pastures.  They see YouTube channels and Instagram pages full of the easy and beautiful parts of homesteading.  As much as I also enjoy these images and videos, I feel that it sets people up for failure on their own homestead journey.  Homesteading and farming is as full of mistakes, hardships, and trials as it is joy, beauty, and rewards.  Each day here is filled with good and bad; and unless you learn to embrace and expect the bad, you will fail.  Just today I was mowing the pasture and getting it ready for winter. It was a beautiful autumn day, and the animals were grazing around me. It could have been a scene out of a story, until my brand-new phone fell out of my pocket, and I didn’t notice until after I had already run it over with the mower deck.   Every new endeavor on the homestead is plagued with a chance for failure.  But failure isn’t always a bad thing.  If you view failure as a learning opportunity, then is it even failing? 

One example that comes to mind is working with our pigs.  When I first added pigs to the homestead it was both terrifying and exciting at the same time.   It took me three different attempts at making shelters for the pigs before I found one that wasn’t destroyed in a matter of weeks.  People told me pigs were destructive, but I thought: how bad could they be?  My first attempt was a simple A-frame structure.  It worked well until we had strong winds.  I mean this wind was so strong that it took my kids large wooden swing set and flipped it upside down. This had never happened in the 7 years of owning it.  The same storm picked the a-frame shelter up, carried it over the pig fence and slammed it into the horse fencing behind it.  My next shelter was a lean to made from pallets.   This lasted even longer until one extremely cold and snowy night one of the pigs decided it was a good idea to try and climb up the side of it and it collapsed.  I didn’t want to leave them with no shelter on such a cold night, so my husband and I were out in the snow with only headlamps and the tractor headlights to illuminate our work fixing up the shelter. The shelter I have now is still made from pallets, but it is much bigger and reinforced by 2x4 and 4x4s.  This shelter has lasted us all season so far with no signs of damage.    Each time one of these shelters failed I learned something and gained experience.  That’s not to say I wasn’t upset and frustrated.  That snowy night I was seriously asking myself why I ever decided to start a farm.  But looking back I can see all the valuable knowledge I gained from the experiences.  My woodworking skills have improved.  I learned all the different ways pigs like to put pressure on the shelters (scratching, digging, climbing).  It was bonding time with my husband was we built the new ones together.  We can now look back at those times and laugh. 

I wish every homesteading influencer would post the good, the bad and the ugly.  It would give people a better understanding of what this life really is like.   Of course, there is greatness.  Like when you sit down as a family and know you provided everything on that dinner table.  When you see your kids learning valuable life skills.  When you can have a quiet moment with your favorite animal on the farm and feel that connection.  But with each of those moments come moments of tears, anger, and frustration.  That’s why homesteaders are such a tough group of people.  We fail all the time, but we learn from the failure; we move on, get better and get stronger.  Don’t let the hiccups, either small or major, stop you from living this life.  If you can make it through, you will be better for it.