Hi and welcome to Millennial Homesteader! I’m Natalie and I homestead side by side with my husband Nic (Farmer Long), and our daughter Evelyn. I decided to start this blog as a way to document our journey to learning to live more self sustainably, go back to the basics per se, to focus on simple and frugal living, to be more healthy, more environmentally responsible; basically become modern homesteaders. 

We are millennials, as in the “generation.” However, this blog isn’t just for millennials. If you are a millennial and are interested in learning how to homestead, then even better! The name just represents our point of view as a millennials trying to learn for ourselves how to homestead. Like many people of our same generation, we didn’t grow up farming, but rather in suburban neighborhoods. My husband and I didn’t know anything about gardening, canning, animal husbandry, etc. We had to (and still continue to) learn by reading a lot, by talking to people with experience, and last but not least, just trying it for ourselves and learning by trial and error. We both work fulltime, and I work from home, so we can only really homestead on the side at this point in our lives, but its still something we consider a lifestyle and we give it our all. 

Even with our short time on this journey, we have learned a lot and will continue to keep learning. Therefore, what we hope most about this blog is that it will provide you with a place to go to learn more about homesteading and to, from people going through it as well. We want to show you how you can get a practical start to your own homesteading journey and hopefully encourage and inspire you along the way. We are in no way legitimate homesteaders like the ones you hear and read about that “live off the grid” or are completely self sufficient. But what we do what we can with what we have and just keep trying to learn more and more skills as we go. Even if you are just here to check out what we are doing or family/friends just wanting to stay updated with our homestead happenings, we are so happy to have you follow along with us, we understand this lifestyle isn’t for everyone. 

We started our homesteading journey back in 2014 while living in the suburbs of southern California. We put in a garden, kept a couple chickens, and raised meat rabbits all in our tiny backyard. We didn’t have acres and acres of land, we didn’t even have a quarter-acre for that matter. But we made due with the space that we had… That’s when we got the homesteading bug and have been wanting to expand on our homesteading capabilities ever since. For years we dreamed and prayed (a lot) about getting some land so we could do more homesteading and farming. In the beginning of 2016, our dreams finally came true! We sold our suburban home and bought 13 acres in the rural countryside, only about 40 minutes away from our suburban home. We quickly and significantly increased our chicken flock, put in a big garden, got goats and a sheep, raised pastured chickens and turkeys, raised pigs, tried out quail, and did lots of other homesteading projects and learned so many more skills.

However, ever since we really started getting into homesteading, we always pictured ourselves living in a different state. So in the beginning of 2019 we took a big leap of faith and bought a house with 20 acres in southern middle Tennessee. We sold off and gave away all our farm animals (besides the dogs) before we moved to TN. We had to start all over when we got here, but the knowledge and experience we gained over the years have helped carve out what we really want in a farm and homestead. Follow along with us as we start our homesteading adventure over in TN. I will try my best to share with you everything we learn as we keep working towards figuring this homesteading thing out and how to best develop our land into the farmstead of our dreams!

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