Holistic Homestead with The Schoolhouse Life

Adrenal Fatigue (Part 3) (what I started doing: lifestyle)

I love the metaphor of cleaning. There’s something about it we dread, but then you start doing it and it’s hard to put the sponge away–everywhere you look there’s something that could use just a bit of a touch-up. And how nice it feels to l...

Adrenal Fatigue (Part 1) 

a 4 part deep-dive into my on-going efforts to heal my Adrenals.

If you’re like me, this term ‘Adrenal Fatigue’ has been popping up in my belly (yes, my belly, it’s where most my good ideas come from) for almost a decade. My naturopath officially diagnosed me with and gui...

• My hay was bad.
• That the broomsedge was going to take over my whole field
• That I needed to p...

For way too many years we waited to add cows to the homestead. We are 10 years into our current property and just got a bull and a heifer. Take a look at their picture below.

I gonna go out on a crazy limb and say that now I would suggest cows over just about any other animal as the started animal f...

Have you noticed? There's a migration happening right now, from the desk chair to the garden bed. From the e-business to the dirty fingernails, from the fast-paced hustle of the corporate world to the demands of crafting a truly nourishing home base. From reliance to resilience.

It's about time.

A pig has a plow on the end of its nose because it does meaningful work with it. It is built to dig and create soil disturbance, something it can't do in a concentrated feeding environment. The omnivore has historically been a salvage operation for food scraps around the homestead. - Joel Salatin

"Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness." –Anne Frank

'We are the only species of mammal that doubts our ability to give birth. It's profitable to scare women about birth. But let's stop it. I tell women: your body is not a lemon.' -Ina Mae Gaskin

I CANNOT wait to share this week's podcast! We're putting the final touches on it right now, but...it'...

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity - Albert Einstein

In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.
- Michael Pollan

The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses. - Malcom X

There is no way that you can have a decent life as a man if you aren't awake and aware every moment. Show up for your own life. Don't pass your days in a stupor, content to swallow whatever watery ideas modern society may bottle feed you through the media, satisfied to slumber through life in an ins...

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.” – Abraham Lincoln

What is a homesteader?
After spending a few days with about 5,000 homesteaders it's had me really trying to define what a homesteader is.

Bart and Erica had the question t...

"Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath

In this week's podcast, we are talking about Smita one more time. There's so much to talk about and think about. But really what we are seeing is a gradual...

Did you know that most homesteads fail in 6 years?

two years of "honeymoon"

Two years of trying to fix everything that's broken

one year of giving up

one year to sell it.

When you think about your homestead if you're like me you look at what's working and what's not working. You look at what you can see ...

"Time and space are interrelated. To overlook either of them is to be partially blind. What we plead against is man’s unconditional surrender to space, his enslavement to things. We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance t...

"Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible." - Karl Marx

With all the crazy that's been happening in this world I think we all have been wondering "do I have the skills ...

'Inevitably the real garden with a growing family of children will be untidy, messy even, noisy and often destructive. It drives arch control freaks like myself mad. But I hate it when they are not there.'
--Monty Don

Stick a pin in it! The summer garden is over!

Now it's time to start planting next...