I decided to quit calling myself a homesteader earlier this year, 2022. (Don't freak - keep reading to discover why I was merely temporarily insane.) I actually announced on my YouTube channel that I was no longer going to call myself a homesteader. (Don't look for the video; I have since deleted it.)
The first reason I gave was that where we live, the average annual humidity is seventy-four percent. Our winters tend to be mild, meaning that diseases don't die off easily during that season. Most of our rain comes in April, May, and June, when people around here typically plant out their frost-tender crops: cucumber, peppers, tomatoes, and the like.
But those crops are not just vulnerable to frost. They are vulnerable to fungi such as powdery mildew, blight, and anthracnose.
If you're smart, you are right now figuring out the correct equation that high humidity + ample rain + mild winters = an abundance of fungal disease. Even the native vegetation in our area, including many species of deciduous trees, show signs of disease for much of the year.
Which means, harvests only last so long. And, as I hinted above, the diseases persist in the soil over the winter.
It's not really a huge deal for the vegetable-fruit crops (those mentioned above). By the time the diseases are killing the plant and fruit, I'm tired of eating/harvesting them anyway.
But we've spent about $1,000 learning that no kind of fruit plant, save the goumis, will ever produce much, and will often eventually be killed by some fungus or other.
So one reason I gave in the video as to why I could no longer call myself a homesteader was that we can't produce more than a small fraction of our own food. (This is in large part due to the food sensitivities that my son and I have.) A second one was that, at the time I made the video, I was beyond tired of doing laundry by hand and having to carry my urine outside to dispose of it.
Of course, most modern homesteaders have indoor plumbing and don't have to deal with such issues. But when we first got started on our homesteading journey, we wanted to be off-grid with water, and we didn't want to deal with the inevitable (and inevitably expensive!) plumbing repairs. And off-grid being a big part of the modern homesteading movement, well, it seemed like the right thing to do.
Especially since we, unlike a lot of our homesteading peers, remain on the energy grid.
I got teary-eyed while making the video mentioned above, and was quite whiny and petulant. But while I was trying desperately to explain to my audience the reasons I could no longer, in good conscience, call myself a homesteader, I was ignoring the root of the problem.
Anxiety.
I've suffered with it all my adult life, particularly at the time of the month when my estrogen levels were low. Well, I'm post-menopausal now, so my estrogen levels are low all. The. Time.
I'm working on that, and will blog about what I've found to help me. In general, I'm doing much better now than I was a year ago.
But if you've ever dealt with anxiety (depression is an outcropping of it, so if you've been diagnosed with depression, anxiety is the root), you know that when you get into a funk, nothing is right with the world, seems like it will never be right again. You think negatively, speak negatively, and want to shut down and do nothing because nothing seems worthwhile.
And when external circumstances are actually going wrong, it feeds the anxiety, exacerbating the feelings of hopelessness, dread, and worthlessness. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. All is dark, and getting darker. The only thing ahead is a black hole.
As a result, you might do stupid things, like get on your YouTube channel and cry over spilled milk.
I am back to calling myself a homesteader. Why? That will be the subject of my next blog post.
