Steps to start homesteading from an experienced grower
I searched the article for the two works, &quot;Hard Work&quot;<p>These two words are not included in the article.<p>I grew up on a ranch-style property with homestead type parents.  It was a great experience that involved an endless amount of physical labor.<p>Some examples;
1. Every morning before school, feeding the horses and in the winter checking their water for ice. 
2. Every day after school. Feeding the horses again.
3. Weekly shoveling of horse shit, into a manure spreader. The spreading it in the fields. 
4. Lots of work on small engines that break in the winter the Colorado winter in a cold barn.   
5. In the fall if we were lucky we would kill an Ekl. This required lots of walking around the mountains off-trail looking for an animal. Once found and killed the grueling work of and caring the meat to a vehicle on a road system. Then hours of butchering. Then more hours of hyde tanning. 
6. Winter storms can be powerful enough to rip the tin right off the roof of a hay barn. After the storm, the tins got to be put back on. More hard work. Plowing snow is less physical but still works. 
7. Spring is calving season, a calf may be born in the middle of the night. So you may be up all night supporting the birth. Then haft to go to school the next day and try learning while sleep-deprived. 
8. Summer is hay season, you might get two crops if you&#x27;re lucky. There is always stress around the harvest time. It rains in the afternoons in the summer. And wet hay can not be bailed. If it rains after the hay is bailed and before it is bucked into a barn the bails must be dried. I remember being about 8 years old. So small I could not lift a bale. Me and my two brothers were sent into a 300-acre field to rotate hundreds of wet hay bails. So that they would be dry before we loaded them into the truck. It was exhausting. A few years later, when I was strong enough to lift a bail of hay. We would spend a few days lifting bails onto a flatbed trailer and then lift and stacking bails into a hay barn. It is amazing how nice cold glass of water taste after moving hay bails all day.  
9. I need to get back to work. So I will end with one last note on the work of homesteading; filling a pantry with canned goods for the winter is another major project which takes hours and hours of work
10. Damn my tech job is so fucking easy compared to the work I did on my parents homestead growing up.    
11. Ok, one more: cutting and chopping wood for heating it the winter. We would need between 5 and 7 cords for the house depending on the winter. My Dad found a way to make sure this process was always grueling as I grew up and learned to take on more and more of it. That said, coming home from high school and splinting wood for 20min to keep the house heated for the night was relaxing after a day in class. I guess by the time I was ~15 my body had adjusted to the physical demands of my parent&#x27;s homestead.<p>My 2 cents ~ 01