Who are you?
Hello! My name is Julie Gropp. My husband and I just moved to the DFW area of Texas, after living on a 4 acre plot of land in Southwest Colorado for many years. It was difficult to move from Colorado because we love that part of the country with its mountain views and beautiful seasons. But it is nice to be back to the area where we both grew up, close to family and old friends.
Why did you start this lifestyle?
Homesteading is a lifestyle of self-sufficency. It’s characterized by gardening, raising animals, preserving the harvest, emergency preparedness and learning time honored skills to become more self-reliant.
A few years ago we decided to go “all in” with our homestead. We increased the number of farm animals we have and the size of our garden. We practiced our skills in homemaking and preparedness.
Our focus is to teach our 3 teenage sons to work hard and enjoy the fruits of their labor. We want our family to live a healthy and thrifty lifestyle. You can see more about our “why” in this post.
What is modern homesteading?
Modern homesteading takes the old ways of homesteading and merges them with modern conveniences.
- We aren’t living off grid. We live in a small country town with electricity, city and irrigation (in the summer) water and normal municipal services.
- We use modern appliances. I love my Instant Pot, dishwasher and washing machine. While I know how to live without these things in an emergency, I prefer to use these modern conveniences to get more things done each day.
- We don’t provide 100% of our food supply from our homestead. While this is a dream we would love to accomplish, we aren’t there yet. But we do try to grow as much of our own food as we can.
Why are you blogging about homesteading?
We’d like to share our homestead journey with you. We hope to encourage new homesteaders as we increase our skills and knowledge in these areas.
We definitely don’t know it all, but we want to share with our readers everything we have learned so far. That includes the successes and failures we’ve had on this journey.
Recently, we have narrowed our focus to growing, raising, cooking and preserving real food on our homestead. Producing and consuming real food is good for our family and is becoming a lost art in the modern world.
We want to share the message of real food and how you can make this transition in your life as well.
Top Posts:
Homesteading: 37 Important Homesteading Skills to Learn This Winter
Gardening: Deep Mulch Method for Gardening Part 1: Keeping Weeds at Bay
Real Food: My Favorite Instant Pot Recipes for Real Fast Food
Raising Animals: Raising Meat Chickens: 5 Things I Learned the Hard Way
Homemaking: 15 Easy DIY Sewing Projects for Beginners
Preparedness: 5 Ways to Boost Your Family Emergency Preparedness
I’m loving this, what should I do next?
If you are reading this, you are probably atleast interested in being more self sufficient and taking control of your food.
I have a great FREE challenge to help you organize your kitchen and food storage so that you can gather food to eat and for emergencies. You can sign up here:
We’re so glad to have you join us! We can’t wait to get to know you better so that we can better help you achieve your homesteading goals too!