Homesteading in Suburbia – Ten Tips of How to Begin

If you have been around here much, you know that it is our ultimate dream to own land and have a large homestead out of the city. Yet, homesteading in suburbia is what we have had to work with for the last many years. If you too are in a suburban area, read on for tips and tricks on how to make your suburban home into a homestead.

Consumers to Producers

What does it even really mean to be homesteading in suburbia? Do you have to want to move to the country someday? Or could you just stay in the suburbs and homestead there?

I don’t think you you need to have a desire to move to the country to be a homesteader. Homesteading is more of a state of mind – a way of living. It is making a change away from being consumers to being producers.

Maybe you are already producing things on your own and don’t rely on the grocery store or mall for everything. Maybe you have a small garden or bake bread for your family.

Read on and see what else you can do to be a producer in this consumer world and move on towards your homestead dreams.

Read more about what it means to be a modern day homesteader here

Where it all started for us as Homesteaders in Suburbia

Homesteading in suburbia is something we didn’t know anything about. We didn’t set out to be homesteaders and really had never heard of that word until the last several years. What we did know when we purchased our first home after being married was that we needed a few things.

Those things were space, privacy, and an area we could do with as we pleased.

Space was relative back then! We went from a small apartment with a balcony to a duplex with a small yard for a dog. So space in our first house, which was a 1960s split level, was space on each side away from our neighbors and a large backyard compared to many newer homes.

When looking at homes to purchase, many of them did not have the privacy we craved. We didn’t want huge fences, but we did want to be in our yard and not be seen from every angle. What we did find was a yard with many trees and natural fences with established Arborvitae hedges.

Lastly, we had a lot of space to do with what we wanted. It was mostly grass, but we saw the potential. And there wasn’t anyone telling us what we could or couldn’t do through an HOA.

You can start homesteading wherever you are

So even though we didn’t know what homesteading was when we moved into that first home, we starting doing things like a modern day homesteader would.

And you can too when living in suburbia.

You do not have to have several acres to live like a homesteader.

You can start right where you are and do what you can with it. Maybe you don’t even want to leave the suburbs for a farm or larger property. And that’s ok.

Below I have written about what you can do very easily to start to transition your life from what is considered the norm of the suburban dream, and get back to basics as our homesteading ancestors would have lived.

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10 Ways to start homesteading in Suburbia

Plant a Seasonal Garden (and rip out some of that grass)

This may seem pretty obvious. When we first moved into our home, the entire backyard was grass. From fence to fence to fence. It took my husband well over an hour to mow that first time. My husband loves to mow the grass. In fact, he has called it his quiet thinking time. Yet, we knew we could make better use of that space.

Ripping out almost half the lawn was one of the first things we did. This gave us a lot of space to set up a garden of raised beds.

Over the 10 years that we lived in that home, the raised beds went through many transformations and the grass was cut back little by little to where it took up only about a quarter of the space that it first had. We didn’t want to take it all out as the kids and dog needed a place to play and we all enjoyed having some of it there.

But that garden is the cornerstone of our homesteading ways. Besides being my special place where I plant herbs, tomatoes, summer squash, pole beans, and so many other things our family loves, it provides fresh foods for me to preserve too. Each year I like to expand with new varieties of plants.

This year we are in a new suburban home and will be adding a large straw bale garden. I am very intrigued to compare it to the raised beds we usually plant in.

Plant fruit bearing Trees and Berry Bushes

Whether you are starting out with no trees in your yard or maybe have several that aren’t fruit bearing, planting fruit bearing trees and berry bushes are a good idea and will bring harvests for many many years to come.

Think of the fruits your family loves and grow those. There are many dwarf varieties that will fit well into a backyard.

Some great options are apple, cherry, peach, plum, apricot, and if you are able to grow citrus, any orange, lemon, or lime would be amazing. I grew up with all those except the cherry.

For bushes, we love to have raspberries. Blackberries, blueberries, and elderberries (for that immune boosting syrup) are other great ideas.

Incorporate Edibles into your landscape

Along with having a seasonal garden, planting other edibles into the landscape is a great idea. Sometimes to keep the neighbors happy, you can’t plant a full on garden in the front yard. But don’t let that stop you from planting edibles along with other bushes and flowering plants.

Some examples of perennials that come back each year that do well in this situation are: artichokes, asparagus, rhubarb, strawberries, and many herbs such as mint, rosemary, oregano, thyme, and sage. Depending on your climate and growing zone, you might have many more options for perennial plants.

Start a Compost Bin or a Worm Bin

Most suburban neighborhoods have a yard waste bin or pickup in place. We use ours a lot, but we also have incorporated a compost bin into our yard.

Leaves, weeds, grass clippings (without pesticides), and kitchen scraps can all be thrown into the compost bin just like your yard waste bin. But what you don’t get with sending off your waste is a beautiful end product of compost that you can then use to nourish your garden.

If you don’t have enough space for a compost bin, you can try out a worm bin. They will eat some kitchen scraps and newspapers and turn out beautiful worm castings for your garden.

Get backyard Chickens

If you live in a neighborhood that allows chickens, I would say go for it! Research the rules your city or county has for the number of chickens allowed. Most will not let you have roosters, and unfortunately some will not allow any laying hens. It’s best to know what you can do before doing it.

Also, think about where you will place your hens. I would not suggest putting the birds too close to your own house (trust me on this one) or where they will be a nuisance to neighbors. Fortunately, at our last house we had an older neighbor that grew up on a farm and enjoyed our hen’s noises.

My favorite part about having a small homestead is our chickens. The eggs are, of course, the best part, but also the free fertilizer from their manure, and just how darn fun they are to watch.

See my article about the 10 Reasons You Should Consider Adding Laying Hens to Your Backyard for more great reasons why.

Other Small Animals

If you have some more room after chickens, there are a few small animals you can usually have in the city limits without bugging your neighbors too much.

Some of those animals that are a great addition are:

Bees – Most areas have a bee keepers association where you can learn about beekeeping locally and pick up a mentor to help you through the beginning stages. Having the bees around your garden will increase production (and your neighbors too so most will be happy) and also give you honey to enjoy. They take up very minimal space too.

Rabbits – Rabbits are a great small animal to be added to a backyard. They reproduce quickly and can be used for meat, manure, and also fiber. I am hoping to add rabbits for the manure and meat. This last season I found a neighbor who raises rabbits for show and had bedding and manure they were giving away. I brought home the straw and poo combo for my garden. I have never seen my plants so happy. A great thing about their manure is that it is cool and can be added to the garden right away, unlike chicken manure, which must rest so it does not burn your plants.

Goats – Goats will need much more room than chickens, but with a half acre, you could have two or three goats. People have so many different reasons to keep goats. Meat, dairy (to consume or make into beauty products like soap), and also as pets. You would need to put in quite a bit of research to see if your space is enough and what kinds of goats would do best with what you have. Not all goats are suited for the suburbs.

Start Cooking from Scratch

When you learn to cook from scratch, there are so many benefits. It will save you money, be healthier for your family, and much easier to skip the grocery store and still be able to make a meal.

If you are used to buying many pre-made meals or side dishes, this may seem daunting. But if you take a few small steps each month, you will find that it isn’t overwhelming.

Buying raw ingredients such as plain rice, potatoes, onions, pasta, flour, and meat will be the start to cooking from scratch. Start with simple recipes, like a whole roast chicken. If you have recipes that your family loves that contain a lot of processed ingredients, figure out how you can replace some or all of them to keep the dish, but make it more homemade and healthier.

For example, do you have recipes with condensed soup as an ingredient? It’s really an easy switch to make your own from just a few ingredients. This recipe from Melissa K Norris only takes five simple ingredients.

Learn to Preserve Food

Living in the suburbs, I do not grow enough in my garden to put up a lot of extras from the summer bounty, but I have been preserving food for a long time. Preserving can be canning (water bath or pressure canning), freezing, drying, fermenting, pickling, or even cold storage.

While I don’t have enough produce from my own garden to preserve all that I want, I do source from other places. U-pick farms and farmers markets have become some of our favorite places to frequent in the summer.

We have our special farms where we pick strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries to tuck away into the freezer.

Then we have a favorite farm where we pick quite a few green beans, tomatoes, carrots, and corn. This last year I searched Facebook Marketplace for new sources. I was super happy to find a couple small farms I hadn’t been to before. We were able to pick more than enough for our freezer and canning needs. Freezing green beans that you picked not only is super easy, but the end product tastes so much better than anything you can get in the store.

The cheapest way to preserve food is to grow it on your own. U-pick farms and farmers markets can have some good prices, but can also be pretty expensive. Yet, they both have food at their peak and in season, which is exactly what you want when preserving.

Just recently I read about produce auctions. We don’t seem to have any in our area, but man I wish we did. Search your area for these because the prices I have seen coming out of these are amazing.

Use more Reusable Items instead of Paper products

It took me a long time to make the switch from paper napkins to cloth napkins. I went to a thrift store on a 50% off day and bought up a few dozen napkins for a really great price that we use every day now. Washing them is much better than the amount of napkins we used to go through. We also use them for many things we used to use paper towels for. I still buy some paper towels, but much less.

We also started using bees wax wraps for food storage to reduce our use of plastic cling wrap to cover food. We love it and it works well. Someday I will make my own.

The other item we have used with all three kids is cloth diapers. We have also used some disposable, but mostly cloth. Using cloth has saved tons of money (I bought a lot of gently used ones) and also makes me feel so much better about not putting so many disposables into the landfill.

Dry your clothes on a clothesline

I wish I had a huge clothesline to dry all my wash on. While I don’t yet, I have tried to use the sunshine as much as possible for drying clothes and towels over the years.

When looking up the cost to purchase a clothesline, whether an umbrella clothesline, a pully system, or T-post pole line, they an be quite spendy for a quality clothesline. You might consider a DIY project like this one from A FarmGirl In the Making.

What are you already doing to live this homestead life?

Are you doing any of these things yet? What else are you wanting to do for this homestead life?

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