Harrowsmith – June 2019

Harrowsmith Summer 2019 | 43

W

e’ve lost count of the number of times that we’ve

stood silently, morbidly, looking down upon some

unfinished farm task, dirty and sweaty, perhaps even

a little bloodied, and certainly tired. Always tired. And as we

turned our backs on this thing that’s beaten us, one of us would

mutter, “Well, live and learn, I guess.”

Learning by doing, and by failing,
is how we get things done on our
homestead in Lynden, Ontario. That
seems to be the inevitable rule for all
homesteaders. But how we let those
mistakes affect us has drastically
changed since we started this
adventure in April 2013.
It was probably 18 months after
running full steam into our first
little farm that we crashed, and our
burnout was so intense that it lasted
another 18 months or so. We had
done so much—too much. We had
invested too much money, time and

energy and had rallied our family

and friends for “work days” one too

many times. We worked our day

jobs, then came home to work the

farm in the evenings and, of course,

all weekend. We missed events

with family and friends because we

were either in the middle of some

consuming task or too exhausted

and dirty to leave the house.

Prior to purchasing our farm,

we had done so much reading and

dreaming, attending seminars and

workshops, that we plowed right

into homesteading without a second

thought. We needed to opt out of

the industrial food system—and we

needed to do so ASAP. We needed a

big garden, a pantry, chickens, pigs, a

greenhouse, a pasture, cattle, a sugar

bush, a bee yard, a water capture

system, solar panels and a generally

well-kept property that wasn’t the

scourge of the neighbourhood. If we

had given it a second thought, we

might have asked ourselves, “Do we

like vegetable gardening so much

that we need a 20- by 80-foot veggie

garden in the backyard?” Or “Do we

enjoy picking beans for an hour every

night?” Or “Is eating dinner after

9:30 p.m. every summer evening

something we want for ourselves?”

Had we paused to ask ourselves

these questions, the answers would

have been no, no and no.

In our first year, while

maintaining two full-time day

jobs, we went ahead with our

ENVIRONMENT: EMBRACING FAILURE ON THE HOMESTEAD