Hello, and Welcome to Not Quite a Homestead!
If you’re new here, hi! I’m Karen–a wife and mom of two. I’ve been homemaking since 2011 and started gardening in central Indiana, Zone 6A in 2020.
I’m writing about my gardening experience growing in my zone, as well as other garden-related hobbies like flower arranging, home and garden DIYs, recipes, and preserving tips.
You’ll find lots of garden inspiration, ideas, and be encouraged to grow your own food and flowers.
Who I Am
Have you ever felt like growing food was too difficult, or too time consuming to be worth it?
That was my mindset, too.
We moved to our current home in suburban Indiana in 2017. I had no desire to grow vegetables or flowers, just to maintain the requisite suburban lawn and front garden.
In 2019, I decided to try the gardening thing and grew a few pitiful tomato plants.
The following year, I discovered that food could be grown year-round, even through our cold fall and winter. As I read through these books, I became determined to learn to grow food for my family.
My husband enouraged my interest in gardening and together, we designed a large raised bed garden (larger and much prettier than what I would have done on my own!) and built the garden in 2021.
Honestly, I think spending the winter and early spring researching, learning, and waiting to build the garden only increased my desire to grow the vegetable garden of my dreams.
I decided to make it a potager-style garden, and you can read about that in this post.
Over time, I’ve begun to refine my gardening process, learned to enjoy small and big wins, and deal with failure by keeping the mindset of “there’s always next season”.
Let me encourage you: Growing food can be difficult at first, but it is absolutely worthwhile.
Nothing tastes better than food grown and cared for by your hands; nothing is more satisfying than feeding yourself and your people with vegetables you grew yourself!
What I Grow
Today I grow fruit, all kinds of vegetables, and gorgeous flowers, in my Zone 6A suburban garden as organically as possible. Take a full tour in this post.
I love to experiment with different ways to grow.
My husband has taken over caring for our fruit trees. We have peaches, apples, a nectarine tree, and fig trees. We also grow blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries.
I grow vegetables (mainly tomatoes, peppers, onions, cucumbers, beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, kale, and other greens), herbs, and flowers.
I used to think cut flower gardens were pointless, but when I started my first cut flower garden in 2023, I got hooked!
The more plants we’ve grown, the more bugs and animals we’ve seen on our property and in our gardens.
I’m learning about how our choices are impacting these creatures, as well as the soil and plants in and around our property. We try to grow as organically as we can.
Our goal is to steward our resources well and we are grateful for this amazing world that we get to live in.
Not Quite a Homestead
My husband and I joke that we’re not quite a homestead because it feels like we do everything but raise animals And while it is true that we don’t have animals, we are homesteaders.
Homesteading, to me, is a mindset, a lifelong skill, and way of life.
It’s all about living simply and intentionally–not being too busy to fully be present in life or being so consumer-driven that you have to acquire more and more things and more money to buy those things. Homesteading is cultivating skills to be resourceful, to live on what you can grow or make yourself.
My goal is to provide good food for my family and guests, and to care for the plants, animals, and soil that also call our property home.
Good food, to me, is a sign of love and care. Food grown and prepared with love and excellence feeds not only the body, but the soul. A good gardener not only grows good food and beautiful flowers, but also makes choices that protect the balance of life on our land, from the birds, to the bees, to the bunnies, and the bacteria living in our soil.
Our almost-homestead is a work in progress, and this journey is one that I’m excited to share with you. I’m learning more and more, and growing myself in the process.
I hope that you’ll come along and learn with me, and share what you’ve learned along the way as well.
