5 Ways to Homestead on a Budget

We all see the beautiful homesteads on Instagram and often feel our grasp on that lifestyle slipping away. Beautiful cream metal raised beds, a rock pathway to a large gated garden. Greenhouses filled with the newest pots and tools for whatever method of planting is in this season. Dutch ovens for sourdough and a grain mill that cost as much as a new couch. How is anyone supposed to obtain this lifestyle? It can feel like you are trapped in this consumer life- where large corporations feed you chemicals, clothe you, get you to work and pay you to survive. This is not a dream, or at least to many people these days. If you are looking for something different but dread the cost it doesn’t have to be that way. This is five ways to homestead on a budget.

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Let’s go over some amazing ways you can save money on your homestead, and how to start a homestead with no money!

Just as an emphasis, homesteading from scratch with no money can be so intimidating. But it absolutely doesn’t have to be. Homesteading on a budget is very easy when you get creative, it your mind to it, work hard and often settle for less than perfect! Let’s talk further on this point as we get into these five ways to homestead on a budget!

1.) Learn What You Can with What you Have

You may be asking me “what do you mean by that?” and I’m glad you asked because I am here to answer.

I learned most of my favorite things about homesteading at the cost of zero dollars and zero cents. A beautiful example of this is my sourdough starter and sourdough bread. Most households already have flour in their pantry or cabinet. If you are looking for a low cost way to learn a traditional skill sourdough making is the first place to start. This being said, at this moment you could get up and go to your kitchen and begin a homesteading skill. All you need to make a sourdough starter is a bowl or jar, flour and water. As well as something to cover the container you use (which could easily be a Tupperware lid or napkin with a rubber band)!

This is just one of many examples. A skill I learned at the same time, when I was low on income, was the art of home baking. Learning to home bake and cook can actually save you money instead of costing you more and is such a good skill to have under your belt in general.

2.) Recycle More

Recycling this gardening season saved me close to 100’s of dollars on pots, trays, produce containers for market and so much more. We reuse all our tin cans for our vegetable starts. Save all the plastic containers we get of fruits and berries at the store to reuse in the summers. We use broken trays because that is what we have right now and the rest of the starts we move one by one when they need transferred anywhere. Here is a few more examples of ways you can recycle on the homestead:

• Use old boxes to prevent weeds instead of plastic sheeting from the store
• Disassemble and save the wood and useful items off of things you are throwing away or things that have broken
• Save bailing twine to fix fences
• Keep your laundry lint to start fires
• Milk jugs for creating good greenhouses in the Spring
• Pallets for a trellis, fence or animal enclosure

This is just the tip of the iceberg for recycling.

3.) Buy Secondhand & Search Facebook Marketplace

Exhaust your local thrift stores, garage sales, Facebook marketplace, and discounted sections in farm goods stores! We homestead in a budget by oftentimes waiting to make purchases until we find a cheap or secondhand option. For example, my tomatoes this year have lived without cages. They are extremely expensive at stores and general a dollar or less at garage sales. So my tomatoes have grown propped against pots, wood pieces and against the sides of our raised beds. As we find tomato cages we use them! It would be so nice to have enough for all of them but we don’t so we live without them. We found a manual tiller this same way, and have foraged locals trees and bushes by reaching out on Facebook marketplace. The list of capabilities that come from searching in the right places and asking the right people is a great start to extremely cheap and often free goods for you garden, kitchen and more.

Next time you need something for your homestead search preloved for cheap, before going to a department store to find what you need at full price.

4.) Learn to Sacrifice

Sacrifice is a big part of getting what you want in life. Homestead on a budget with this tip even if it can be hard. Sometimes you have to say no to coffee drinks so you can buy seeds and soil instead. Sometimes you have to have an unaesthetic home so you can have a homestead as well. We can all think of ideas in our head right now if things we have to let go so we can get in return. Sometimes even when something we want is on sale, we have to say no. This is not just good for the homestead but also the bank, and the character.

Doing this allows you to get ahead. Sacrifice things you want or do, and sacrifice the dream aesthetic of your homestead so that you can start it and save money. This means buying secondhand, making things yourself, and other things mentioned before!

5.) Build Sinking Funds

This last point is about what it sometimes takes to get what you want on the homestead. A sinking fund is money that you set aside for a specific item, vacation or whatever it may be. This isn’t just savings money, this is savings money for something specific. Saving up is oftentimes how we can get things we need or want. I have done this for quite a few things on my homestead and farm. My grain mill was one of them! The hard part is how long this can take but with that loss is the gain of not going broke to begin your homestead. Homestead what you can afford and once you save what you need to you can upgrade!

This was five ways to homestead on a budget.

Homesteading skills, saving money, buying secondhand for your farm, these are all ways to make your dreams of a homestead come true faster and cheaper.