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I am not a person who hops on trends, but the mini homesteading trend is one I can absolutely get behind. When you think of homesteading, long days outdoors come to mind: tending the garden, pruning the orchard, chopping wood, and shoveling the chicken coop.
But if you’re like me, that part of homesteading – spending long hours working outdoors on the farm – doesn’t sounds like a whole ton of fun. I’d honestly rather be laying in my hammock, at the beach, or off on a weekend adventure. Maybe the first time it would be interesting and new. But after that? It sounds like a lot of hard work, and a time-sink.
And as a busy mom with a career to focus on, and a love of all things travel, I simply do NOT have any extra time to add “full time farmer” to my resume.
That’s where the mini-homestead comes in.
It’s the perfect little solution to that gnawing feeling that you should be attempting to grow at least some of your food (and maybe teach your kids a thing or two about where their produce comes from, in the process!).
If you’re like me, you don’t have oodles of extra time to weed gardens, build a chicken coops, and prune fruit trees. You’ve got work, kids activities, meal prep, laundry and all the other things that come with family life.
BUT maybe you have 1 hour per week? That’s all I had. And it’s all you really need to start homestead with a full time job.
Real Homesteading vs. Mini Homestead
You might be wondering what is the difference between a real homestead and a mini homestead?
A mini homestead (or “micro-homestead”) is like a tiny version of the real thing. And you still get lots of the benefits of actual homesteading — just without the time commitment.
A real homestead might have complete self-reliance in mind, down to how electricity is produced, how water is managed, and how crops are preserved. Most of us don’t need that level of self reliance. (And if that is your thing, that is cool too! But you might want to start with something smaller and more manageable before you go all in!).
A mini homestead on the other hand, is a bite-sized version of that idyllic dream. It only takes me less than 1 hours per week to manage my mini homestead, so it easily fits into a busy lifestyle.
What does 1 hour a week get me? ALL the aesthetic good bits:
– kids playing with free ranging chickens
– the lush gardens
– the hefty harvests
– asun-dappled orchard
– free nutrient-dense compost
….. and I didn’t have to shovel manure, chop wood, or carry anything heavy.
I also get to teach my kids the important lesson of where their food actually comes from (not the grocery store!).
AND I reduce my family’s reliance on a broken commercial food system. (<– this might be my favorite part!). I despise modern food systems. Food is sporayed with all kinds of chemicals and pesticides, and shipped half way around the world so it can sit on a grocery store shelf (where much of it is thrown out due to not being sold in time).
Starting a mini homestead with a full time job has let my family reduce our grocery bill (slightly) year-round, since my garden, orchard, and chickens produce SO MUCH! We are also able to preserve quite a bit of what we grow.
I put together a weekly checklist for setting up a mini homestead garden in 90 days. You can snag you copy here.
How to Set up a Mini Homestead when you have a Full Time Job
A mini homestead can easily fit into your full time schedule. And truthfully? It’s the missing link between relying on a broken and toxic commercial food system, and being disconnected from nature — to bridging the gap between growing food and eating it. It’s a bite size way to connect back with the land and become partially self reliant — without spending hours working on it everyday.
Truthfully, it takes less than 1 hour per week, and less than $1000 to set up (without multiple trips to the lumber yard!). That’s a good tradeoff considering everything you’ll get from this small amount of effort.
But the trick is: setting up your mini homestead correctly. So that Mother Nature will do the heavy lifting.
The mini homestead method is my super powerful, yet lazy-coded secret sauce to starting a homestead with a full time job. In this post I’m going to go through the three main components of my easy-to-maintain micro-homestead: Garden, Orchard and Chickens.
This set-up gives my family plenty of veggies, fruit, and eggs in a fairly small footprint, with minimal upkeep.
How to Start a Low-Maintenance Vegetable Garden
My mini homestead garden consists of 2 raised beds – each 4′ x 8′, and one planter box: 24″ x 60″. This space has been enough to grow a crazy amount of produce. Especially if you plant in two rounds: early season (cold) crops, which grow March-May, and then your regular spring/summer garden after that in the same footprint.
You can buy raised bed kits, and pre-built garden boxes on Amazon that are super easy to assemble. Here are a couple that I like:
Then you’ll need to fill your boxes with high quality soil (not just dirt). Here is my super easy garden soil recipe. Literally dump the bags in your garden bed and mix it all up! You can buy all the ingredients at any garden store, or big box stores like Lowes or Home Depot:
Easy 3-Part Garden Soil Recipe:
– 1 Part Top Soil – this adds structure.
– 1 Part Compost – this adds nutrients.
– 1 Part Peat or CocoCoir – this improves drainage.
This probably goes without saying, but you will want to only plant vegetables that your family eats a lot of. For us, that’s tomatoes (plus extra for tomato sauce), cucumbers, lettuce, beans, peas, eggplant, radishes, carrots, and herbs.
Depending how your crops do, you may get more or less than you wanted of anything. The main issues your garden may face are pests and disease. I always try to buy disease and pest resistant varieties of anything I plant to avoid these crop-busters as much as possible. A simple garden fence around your garden does wonders for keeping out common garden pests like deer, rabbits, and groundhogs.
Watering your garden will be where most of your time goes. A simple soaker hose with a hose timer can give you your time back if you don’t have an extra 10 minutes a day to water (OR will keep you whole garden alive and well while you are out of tome, which is a huge perk if you love to travel like me!).
Instead of fertilizing my garden, I add more compost to my garden beds each season, and sometimes mid-season, if it seems to use a pick me up. It seems to do the trick and is a much more natural way to feed your plants and improve your harvest. You also reduce the risk of burning your plants by using compost. Chemical fertilizers can be too harsh on plants if used too much.
If you have a small space, I highly recommend using this compost tumbler, and adding all your extra food & yard scraps (the ones you cant give to your chickens). This modern looking kitchen compost bucket makes the job easy.
How to Set up a Low-Maintenance Orchard
Similar to your garden, a small orchard can provide a ton of fruit. I find that growing fruit is more finicky than growing vegetables, and is a big more dependent on the weather each season. A late frost can decimate your yield if it kills any flowers on your trees or bushes.
With that in mind, fruit can be even easier to maintain than a vegetable garden!
You typically only need to water fruit plants when the plants are first getting established. After that, your plants are pretty much hands-off as far as daily maintenance! And they winter-over so you don’t need to replant each year, like you do with vegetables.
My fruit orchard has blueberries, blackberries, grapes, raspberries, apples, pears, peaches, nectarines, cherries, a persimmon tree, and paw paws. That may sound like a lot, but it’s in a fairly small space at the very back corner of my yard, and it produces a lot.
Your main concerns for an orchard is (1) ensuring the fruit trees get plenty of sun everyday (6+ hours). And (2) be sure to keep deer away, since they will eat all the fruit off your trees and bushes.
A 4′ tall fence typically deters deer enough to keep them out. Here is an option you can order on Amazon, or you can pick up a roll of fencing and stakes from your local garden store or Lowes/Home Depot.
Fruit plants also need to be fed a couple times per season, which means just dumping a bag of compost around the base of the tree, and covering with mulch (keeping it away from the trunk).
I like to make a little “moat” around the base of my trees each season when I add compost, which helps keep any rain water near the tree roots to ensure they are getting plenty of water.
Certain trees and bushes need a little more care than others. For example, you will need to prune [most] fruit trees once per year in the early spring or late fall, so that airflow between branches is good. This prevents fungus and disease. It only takes my husband about 1 hour to prune for the whole orchard.
How to Set up a Low-Maintenance Chicken Coop
Chickens are a staple of a mini homestead. It takes your “little garden” up a level to really be considered a “homestead”. When you have backyard chickens you aren’t just dabbling, you’ve made it.
And the fresh eggs make it ALL worth it. <3
The good news is that chickens are actually extremely low maintenance! We have traveled for a week without worrying about them, or having someone watch them. With more automated systems we could realistically stretch that to two weeks.
So if you are someone who loves to travel (like me!), chickens are the perfect way to up-level your mini homestead in a low maintenance way. By automating their water and food with an XL auto-waterer and a large auto-feeder, you will still have time to do all the things you love to do / need to do: travel, work full time, raise a family, and have a life (not a full-time farm).
There are also adorable chicken coop kits available on Amazon for short money. We have 9 chickens, but because of chicken math, I highly recommend you buy a coop for 2x your desired flock size. Firstly, because the coop “sizing” online seems way too small for a happy chicken, and I’d rather give each chicken more square footage. And secondly, chicken math is real and you WILL be getting more chickens very soon. …Oh yes, you will.
The difference between a high maintenance chicken coop and a low maintenance chicken coop is how you manage their bedding. I highly recommend using the deep litter method. This is where you use pine shavings in the coop, and add instead of fully swapping them each time they’re dirty, you just add a layer of shavings on top of the dirty shavings. (Extra bonus points because you don’t need to shovel chicken poop on the regular… only ~ 3x per year). The deep layers of shavings in the coop compost themselves (and somehow do NOT smell!). The deep litter method saves a ton of time, AND when you do swap out the shavings, only a few times per year, you end up with a pile of highly nutrient dense compost to put on your garden and orchard.
Here are a few other key things to think about when you are setting up a low-maintenance chicken coop:
- Make sure there is adequate ventilation
- Make sure there is plenty of sunlight in the run
- Be sure to only get chickens that are appropriate for your climate.
It was 0 degrees Fahrenheit today and my 9 cold hardy chickens are fine without any heaters. (Though, they like the cold and snow just about as much as I do).
Mini Homestead is your cheat-code to your *idyllic* Aesthetic Farm Life, without the time commitment (Major Win!)
Once you set up your chicken coop, plant your little orchard (even just 2 trees and. a few berry bushes), plant a small garden bed, and start using your compost bin, you will officially be running your own mini homestead!
It’s easier than you think, to get those lush garden beds, bowls of fresh fruit, and never have to buy eggs from the store again.
If you’re starting from scratch, and you’re committed to making this year THE YEAR that you start building your little slice of that aesthetic, sustainable life you’ve always wanted, then Early February is the best time to get started.
How to start your mini homestead NOW
I’ve mapped out your first 90 days in this weekly garden checklist, which covers everything you need to do each week to set up and start your first mini homestead garden between February 1st – April 30th, get your first harvest of cold-tolerant veggies, and flip your garden for warm weather crops.
Grab your copy of the 90-Day Garden Checklist here:
This weekly garden checklist is designed to give you a quick win: an early season harvest before you even plan your regular summer garden!
Once you get your vegetable garden up and running, you can plant a couple fruit trees and berry bushes, and think about your chicken coop set-up. Within just one season you can start your own mini homestead, even with a full time job, and kids. it only takes about 1 hour per week (& only during your growing season)!
To get started quickly, check out my guide to what to plant in March before the last frost, to get your garden started as early as possible.
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