How to Homestead on a 1/4 Acre Lot in Town

We have moved from our 4 acre lot in the country to an in town lot (still in the country).

The house is a fixer upper and the lot is about 1/4 acre total.

That’s not alot of room for a “homestead”.We are definitely going to have to change some things about our homesteading life to fit this new situation.

But before I discuss what these changes are and how you can homestead on a small town lot, I want to talk about why we made this move for our family.

Why did we move into town?

When I first started this blog 4 years ago, I wrote a blog post about why we moved from the city to a small town in SW Colorado.

If you are interested in that post, you can read it here —> How A City Girl Becomes A Modern Homesteader.

The land we moved from last month, we had lived on for 8 years and built 2 houses on it (you can read about our house fire here).

Let me just say, I loved that house. I loved the space, the finishes, the view and the land. It was amazing.

But I didn’t love the toll it took on our finances and our debt. I wanted desperately to be debt free again like we had been in the past (before kids).

We also have 3 kids in high school (senior, junior, and freshman) so that means soon we would have 3 kids in college. We wanted to help them financially and we didn’t have much wiggle room in the budget with a large house and debt.

We had tried to sell 2 years after we built the second house, but the timing wasn’t right and we took it off the market after a year.

So when we decided to put it back on the market in January 2020, I thought it would take a long time to sell. Long enough for my first child to graduate in May and go off to college.

It was under contract in 11 days. To the first family that looked at it. Crazy right? That doesn’t happen much in our part of the country.

What are we changing?

So how are we going to make this change work for us? Here are some plans we have for this property.

• small water trough garden: we will be using our water troughs again, with a few changes. We have 5 troughs, so they will each hold 1 type of produce.
• small flock of chickens: we gave away our last 2 chickens before the move (predators ate the others), so once we build a new chicken coop we will start with a few baby chicks, probably this fall.
• plant 3 fruit trees: since it’s a small property, 3 is probably all we can handle. Many fruit trees need similar trees to pollinate, so we may get 3 of the same kind. Not sure yet.
• joining a CSA for more fresh produce: we have already signed up for a local CSA and will start getting produce straight from the farm in June.
• buy a whole cow for the freezer: right now we are buying small quantities of meat straight from the farm, but we will buy a full cow after fair season.
• continue cooking real food meals for the family: this is an everyday thing, and it won’t change. We cook real food for every meal with one weekly date night to go out to eat.
• preserve the harvest from the garden and CSA: we will be canning and freezing (takes less space) some of the food we get from the garden and CSA for winter consumption.

Growing, raising, cooking and preserving real food for our family will still be our priority. The scale is just a little smaller than it was before.

We will be utilizing our community more to find organic produce and meats to feed our family. I don’t think this is a bad thing. Just a small pivot to help us keep our food security and values going.

Are we still homesteaders?

Going from a 4 acre homestead to a small town lot will be a big change. It isn’t the ideal when it comes to homesteading.

But homesteading isn’t about acreage or production. It’s a state of mind.

To me, homesteading is a way of living more self sufficiently in a modern world. In a world that wants things instantaneously and done for you, homesteaders want to learn how to do things themselves.

You may not be able to grow all of your food or raise all of your own meat. But you can grow some of your own food and learn how to raise meat on a small scale.

You can learn how to cook your own food from real ingredients and maybe make a few less trips to the grocery store each week.

You can learn how to preserve food for later, whether you get that food from your own garden, your neighbors garden, the farmers market or the grocery store.

For more ideas on learning homesteading skills, check out this blog post —> 15 Homesteading Skills to Master for Better Self Reliance.

I’m not gonna lie. This transition hasn’t been smooth. I miss my old house, with all the space and isolation and view.

But our new situation has benefits too and we are going to be here for several years. So we are making the best of it and committing to staying out of debt in the future.

Then when our kids are out of college, we will probably look for place to build a retirement home . One with peace and quiet, a view and a big porch to sit on and rock.

By then I think we will be thankful we made the choice to move into town and get out of debt.

This will be a new adventure and we are ready to get started. We will embrace what we have now and try to make the most of it.

And I encourage you to do the same. No matter if you live in an apartment, town home, small city lot or 40 acres. You can homestead no matter where you live. Make it count!

How much land do you homestead on? Let us know in the comments below. And if you found this post helpful, please share. Thanks!