Creative Mountain Mama
Welcome to the Creative Mountain Mama podcast - for those that resonate with seeking a connection to the land, family, and a simpler way of life. We're talking about faith, motherhood, and slow country living. If you're up for real talk, genuine experiences, and finding inspiration in some of the most extraordinary places, this is for you!
Grab a metaphorical campfire seat and let's dig into the good stuff.
Creative Mountain Mama
Life Unplugged with a Homesteading Family
Have you ever considered trading city life for the off-grid life? This week, we're joined by Jo, the heart behind Feels Like Homestead, who did just that. Hear her story of swapping pavement for greener pastures, as she pursues a life of simplicity alongside her family in a yurt. She started by participating in Civil War reenactments and continued on to adapt that live style into their own and shares her personal revelations along the way. Jo's story is driven by challenges and a yearning for cleaner living.
This episode isn't just about simple living; it's a look at the practicalities of day-to-day life when you step off the beaten path. We journey through Jo's transition from establishing roots on their own piece of land and navigating some modern convenience withdrawals. Joe's story paints the picture of the incremental shifts towards a self-sufficient homestead.
We dive into multi-generational living, parenting, and support within her close-knit family. I love this conversation because it is a testament to the challenges of off-grid living, parenting, and the joy found in the little things. As she documents this life-altering journey on her blog, she extends an invitation to all of us to join in the adventure. Tune in for a story of courage, community, and the pursuit of a life less ordinary.
Instagram: @feelslikehomestead
Website: Feels Like Homestead
YouTube: Yurt Tour
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Each episode of the "Creative Mountain Mama Podcast" sets the stage for meaningful conversations to inspire you.
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Stay tuned for more episodes exploring the connection between faith, motherhood, and slow country living.
Welcome everyone. This week I am joined by Joe. She is the author and orchestrator of the Feels Like Homestead Instagram account. You can find her there as well as building out her blog Joe, what's new?
Speaker 2:Hi guys, gosh, what's new? There's been a lot going on recently. I think the most interesting thing that we've been trying to work on these days is instilling catechism with our three-year-old like Bible story versus kind of things like that. He comes over and he says so if PJ brings up hypothetical we talked about that tonight I was like okay. A few minutes later he was like so I guess he was reading her the book of Luke and they came upon that part where the Pharisees are asking Jesus about the man who died and his wife had to marry all his brothers in secession. Pj was like wait, how many brothers did he have? She could not believe he had that many brothers. Cody told her it was a hypothetical scenario. Pj was like what is hypothetical, thank you. The little three-year-old isms have just been lightening up my life recently.
Speaker 1:I know you talk a lot about off-grid lifestyle, multi-generational living and creating a frugal family homestead pretty much from scratch. Could you talk a little bit about this lifestyle and how everything started?
Speaker 2:Gosh, I feel like there were so many different aspects of our life that have kind of pushed us into this direction. How everything started was when we got married. We actually started with civil war reenactments and when you're out there, you are completely off the grid. You're not allowed to have anything modern at your camp for the public to see. No phones, no electric lights, no, nothing. It was so nice, I don't know. We just absolutely loved it and we came home and we were like, dude, we would love to live like this all the time. That was kind of our first little note in the back of our brain that this could be something we actually tried to do. We were dirt poor. We were super, super poor because we were both fresh out of high school. We didn't have a lot of money and we were trying to save on all of our electric bills and whatnot. We were like let's just not use the lights. Every few months we were reconsidering how can we cut this bill? No TV, cheapest phone plan available? What if we actually were able to disconnect from our electricity bill altogether? What if we didn't have a water bill? What if we didn't have a lot of the other things? What if we didn't have a mortgage? What if we didn't have any of those kind of payments? We continued to make adjustments to our modern lifestyle that led us in that direction. And then what was it?
Speaker 2:Three years ago, Well, four or five years ago, we started trying to have our first baby and I had three miscarriages in a row and weren't sure what was going on with that. The modern doctors weren't helpful at all in that instance. And then we did have our first baby, PJ, and everything went fine. But it was a really rough labor and delivery. And we decided for our next pregnancy to go with midwife. And our next pregnancy also ended in miscarriage, but that time the midwife was so amazing. She was wonderful, she was so thoughtful and helpful and walked with us every step of the way and was like we are gonna do testing, we're gonna get to the bottom of why this is happening and start looking for some answers. And she started with blood work that showed that I had some pretty bad thyroid problems Hashimoto's thyroiditis to be specific, where it's an autoimmune disease, where your body is basically trying to kill your thyroid because it thinks it's a foreign invader.
Speaker 2:And if you're not producing enough thyroid hormones, then you can't sustain a pregnancy? Well, because you're not providing enough thyroid to the placenta and all of that. So that looked like it was gonna be part of the issue. So trying to heal that, along with taking thyroid medication to get my levels to where they needed to be in the meantime, we wanted to actually heal the problem if possible. So we started going down the diet route, trying to fix the leaky gut and do all the things to support my body so that it could heal itself.
Speaker 2:And that took us down the clean eating rabbit hole and all the endocrine disruptors that also mess with your hormones and your adrenal glands. And my husband is a research guru. I mean, it's kind of like an OCD thing, Like when he gets something in his mind that he wants to figure out, he's all in the research front. So he was coming home every night from work because he has a lot of downtime at work with all kinds of articles and I listened to this podcast or I watched this YouTube video. We say he graduated from YouTube Academy. That's how he learns all of his stuff.
Speaker 1:In there.
Speaker 2:And yeah. So we went down that route a lot and we've been gluten free since then. We've been decreasing our sugar intake, we've switched to raw dairy, we're working on cutting out a lot of grains, kind of going more toward a paleo-esque type. We're not strictly in one diet or another, but just trying to cut out preservatives, trying to cut out all the pesticides. We're trying to eat organic as much as possible, but we're still not rich. So affording all of this healthy meat, healthy vegetables, healthy food and all the things is really difficult and, some months, impossible. So if we want to continue eating this way, we have to grow it ourselves. So the off-grid desire and mentality kind of merged with the needing to provide our own food for ourselves and that's what kind of led us to this little spot together where we're off-grid and providing our own food, because it's really the only way we can afford to do that right now.
Speaker 1:And what does the off-grid look like?
Speaker 2:For us it's I guess it's not what you would say traditionally off-grid. When people think about off-grid they think of like living in the wilderness and they're miles away from Walmart and they have to haul in all of their own everything and whatnot. We live on, we have five acres and my parents live next door and they have five acres. They are on the grid and we live in a yurt which if you're watching the YouTube video, you can actually see around me here. We live in a yurt that is not connected to power. On our parcel next door we use their shop. They have a big shop that's between our two houses and it has electricity, so we use that for charging battery. There's a mini fridge out there that we keep. If we have like fresh meat that we don't want to freeze or cook right away, we keep that out there. And we do take showers next door at their house because we have yet to develop a good bathing system here that's feasible for everybody on a regular basis. But we use battery powered lights or oil lamps, candles. We use a ice pot like a cooler, like a Coleman cooler, that we have frozen jugs of water that we switch out with the freezer in the shop every day. That's our indoor refrigerator.
Speaker 2:We use a composting toilet. We do haul our own water in a three gallon jug or kettles or whatever we're filling up. We haul that in from either the tap next door or we did actually dig a shallow well right outside the yurt. That water isn't quite as clean, so we don't use it for like washing dishes, necessarily, or the rinse water, but we can put it through our filter to drink. We use it for the dog's water. We use it for like pre-rinsing anything or washing hands outside. We do have a sink that drains. We just don't have a sink that puts water in. So we joke that we have running water if you walk fast enough with it.
Speaker 1:So you started from Civil War re-enactments. You got a taste of what this lifestyle is like. Did you have like a city experience and started slowly, or did you guys just kind of throw yourselves into off-grid living? What preparation occurred?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so when we first got married we lived in a fifth wheel trailer in the front yard of my parents' old house. They had about an acre and a half just outside the city limits and the power in that trailer was so in and out that it was very low power to that trailer so you could have like lights, coffee or heat you got to pick one. So you had to prioritize your electricity. So trying to cut our budget coincided well with having to cut our electricity. And when we moved to our first apartment, like I said earlier, we were trying to still cut our expenses. We didn't have a money, we didn't have a house, we didn't have a microwave in that apartment we didn't have. We still didn't have a TV in that one and we were using solar lights when possible to try to cut our electric bill. And then we lost that apartment when I lost my job and our friends out in the other side of the valley had a rental house that they were gonna remodel in a few months, and so they were kind enough to let us stay there if we only pay the electricity for otherwise, for free, until they were ready to remodel, which was gonna be several months, which gave us time to look for something else in the meantime. But again, since our only bill out there was the electricity, we were trying to cut that as much as possible. We also didn't have internet service out there or cell service. Well, my husband had cell service but he was gone all the time and he only had a flip phone at the time, so it's not like you could watch YouTube or anything on his phone I had. I could get the neighbor's wifi if I put my phone in the window in the back bathroom, but if I walked out of the bathroom I'd lose the signal. So I could get texts out now and again. But in that house we really learned to just enjoy each other's company and play board games and be present in the moment, and it was another one of those little tastes of wow like this is nice. I could get used to this. There's nobody calling, there's nobody texting, there's no social media beckoning me to come and scroll and check things. I remember in the apartment that would be something that Cody would get really irritated about. Not he was never like loud about it, but I could tell he was upset when I'd be laying in bed next to him on Facebook instead of talking to him, and it was just kind of an addiction, right, I think we, a lot of us, struggle with that. It's just there so we do it. But when you don't have that opportunity it can create a nice little buffer from all those distractions.
Speaker 2:And then after that we moved into a duplex back in town, which was so hard because that last place was on like 300 acres in the woods that backed up to logging land that went all the way to the coast. It was amazing, you could just hike forever. And coming back into town was hard. We lived in duplex for about another six or eight months, got a little garden going in that tiny little backyard and there we grew our first tomatoes and some lettuces that all immediately bolted, couldn't eat any of them. And then after that we bought our first house still in town but it had a bigger yard, and at that point we got some ducks and for eggs and we got a bigger garden going and we got a little more practice there. And in that house we didn't have a dishwasher or a microwave or a dryer, we only had the washing machine. And we figured, you know what, if we actually want to go off grid and like cut all the electrical bills and everything, let's just practice, let's not have anything. We didn't have the only heat was the wood stove, and it was really too small for that house too, so you really had to keep that stove going to keep the house warm in the winter. And then you had all the laundry racks like push right up next to it to try to try all the clothes in the winter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then after that it was actually shortly after that later miscarriage with the midwife, where we started learning all these details about the health and everything that my parents moved out to their five acres and then their neighbors. The parcel next door to them was just bare land, it was just trees, forest, and it didn't have any access of its own. The only way to get to the property was through my parents' house. They actually used to be one parcel at one point and they had to split it off for some reason, and so the owners of that second parcel were trying to get my parents to buy their property as well, because they couldn't do anything with it and my parents didn't have the budget to buy a second parcel in addition to the house they just bought.
Speaker 2:But Kody and I were like I wonder if we could work something out with these guys, because they're kind of in a bind right.
Speaker 2:They're trying to offload this property and we offered this is kind of simplifying it but we basically swapped our house in town for their piece of land. They were able to get the house that they could rent or sell or whatever, and we got the piece of land and it was a fabulous deal. It worked out. It worked out for our purposes. Financially, anybody would tell you it was a terrible deal because we definitely lost money on that deal, but we got to where we wanted to be, which I don't think we would have been able to financially make happen any other way. Just because we couldn't Our house wasn't worth enough to actually get good land with a house on it or anything like that and because the property was next door to my parents, we were able to do the offload off-grid thing a little easier, having kind of slide into it with electricity next door instead of having to invest a bunch of money up front in solar panels or anything like that. Yeah, that's how we got out here, basically.
Speaker 1:Is there anything you miss? That is way more laborious than you thought, or was everything pretty smooth, everything you kind of slid into it and made really intentional decisions?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Hot showers. Hot showers is what I miss. Easy, hot showers in my own house. Happen to go next door, which is only on the other side of the shop there, but happen to go next door for a shower. I miss being able to just shower at home. You got to.
Speaker 1:Come back in the cold.
Speaker 2:Yeah, go back in the cold to get back home, go back through the snow if it's wintertime.
Speaker 1:Say that's good for you, though. Thank you. Hot showers in a cold plunge, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, going trucking across the snow and your slippers and your bathrobe Back to your.
Speaker 1:Can you tell me a little bit about what the support system of having your parents nearby has meant for you as a mother?
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, that's a whole journey in itself. Like I said, there are so many aspects to where we are today. My mother and I had a rocky relationship coming out of high school and going into adulthood I think a lot of us do trying to differentiate our adulthood, trying to be an adult, with having been a kid. Your mom has always been your parent. That tells you what to do and you need their permission or their approval for most things. And all of a sudden you're like, oh, I have to make my own decisions and live with my own consequences, and she doesn't have to agree and I'm still free to do it, but I also have to be responsible for my own consequences. Yeah, I struggled with that part, and especially living near them for so long. When we first got married, we were living right in their front yard In town. Those next few places were still within 15, 20 minutes of them. I found myself continuing to go back and go back and lean on her for approval in a way that wasn't healthy. I'm not saying you shouldn't want your parents' approval. That's great if you can get it but it was. I don't know how to explain it very well. I don't think they were judging me but they weren't. But I was really judging myself so I was projecting it onto them. Yeah, that was fun. Those were fun times when we moved out here after we had some separation living in town.
Speaker 2:I feel like I matured a lot. That got better when I had my first baby. That changed things hugely because all of a sudden I was doing a lot of the things I said I'd never do, or not doing the things that I said I would do. I think a lot of us who have kids have had that experience as well, where we have to eat some humble pie after we've said, oh, I'll never feed my kids McDonald's French fries. Then we go and buy the McDonald's because they threw their dinner on the floor one too many times and we were just over it and can't bother to cook another meal. Yeah, I did that. I had a lot more grace for my mom's parenting skills and the way she did things she did. I think I grew up and learned to make my own decisions a lot better and realized that she actually wasn't judging me. It was me judging myself and just worried that everyone else was judging me the way I was judging me.
Speaker 2:Then, shortly before we moved. My parents got at the time they were 15 months old fostered twins who were 12 years old. It's kind of a complicated story but my husband and I were very involved with that and at one point we were thinking about adopting them. But the way that their story and situation worked, we weren't able to adopt them but my parents were able to get them in a guardianship. So my parents have them. My parents are their official legal guardians but my parents are in their 50s and having five-year-old now twins with some residual behavioral issues that they've grown beautifully through, my mom has done such an amazing job with these kids. They're so much better off than they were before. It's wonderful to see. But having my husband and I around to be a support system to them has also been really important. We've kind of been doing this back-and-forth co-parenting thing where they actually call my parents grandma and grandpa and they call us mama and daddy because we have more of that role and now that we live next door it took a couple probably the whole first year to really get comfortable with the.
Speaker 2:You know we are doing a multi-generational homestead, combined living thing like they did in yield days, and it's true you think about it. This whole like every family lives in their separate house, minutes from each other, if not hours. That's a really modern phenomenon and there's a lot of flack out there like, oh, you live with your parents. What you couldn't make it out on your own, you have to rely on them. And it's not like that. It doesn't have to be like that and it can be so good when you have a healthy relationship with each other. You set good boundaries, but you also are just really open to yeah, we can do life together. We can help each other. We can help each other's kids. We can share food, share resources, share showers as it happens to be right now not at the same time, but it's their shower they needed to be sun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so having my mom and my dad there to help give me a break every so often. My mom takes PJ and little A once a week. I have a second baby now who just turned 11 months, and she takes them once a week for the day and I take the twins once a week for the day, so we each get a full day off each week to catch up on things or just have a little time to ourselves. We do family dinners together most every night. These days. It helps keep the table clear if we know that we have to be eating at the table every night. So having kind of that pressure of quote unquote, guess coming over we're not guess, but having someone another whole family coming over to eat makes you have to keep the table clear, which goes so far in keeping your whole house tidied up. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm kind of rambling again.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's great. It sounds, I mean, idyllic in a lot of ways, and I know there's obviously life isn't easy and there's there's struggle, heartache, tears and laughter and joy. Can you hear me? No-transcript. Are there any Bible verses that you've stood on or have helped to get you through?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was actually. I was thinking about this the other day ahead of time. And the passage of Matthew 6, 25 through 34, that's the section that where Jesus is talking about not worrying. Do we do we have time for me to read those few verses, please? So it goes.
Speaker 2:Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life or what you will eat or drink, about your body. What you will wear. Is life not more than food and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air. They do not sow or weep or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they Can?
Speaker 2:Any one of you, by worrying, had a single hour to your life. And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin, and yet you, and yet I tell you that not even Solomon and all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If this is how God closed the grass of the field, which is here today and then tomorrow thrown in the fire, will he not much more clothe you, he who of little faith? So do not worry saying what shall we eat or what shall we drink or what shall we wear? For the pagans run after these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them to seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all of these things will be given to you as well. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow we will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own, and this passage comes right after Jesus tells his followers not to store up treasures for themselves on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, but to store up treasures in heaven. And since our life personally is so full of self-sufficiency and prepping and planning and all of that, it can be easy for us to slide from the healthy planning and diligence into worry and stressing and so much that it can detract from our real mission on this earth, which is to seek first the kingdom of God, which is kind of what we're trying to do with this whole homesteading thing, the multi-generational, the raising these kids, kids that weren't our own and now they are and raising up the next generation and the Lord.
Speaker 2:You know, sometimes the homesteading seems it kind of gets in the way of, or not in the homesteading, the kingdom work can feel like it's getting in the way of the homesteading and things get put on the back burner, like making space for the children to be involved in our projects. Since so much of our time is spent working on projects and chores, letting the kids be with us and involved is so important. Otherwise we wouldn't have a chance to interact with them. I mean, we're so busy all the time doing stuff around the property and definitely slows things down to have them around. But that is kingdom work, that involving them in the homestead and in the little bits of our lives. And that work comes first.
Speaker 2:And then those blessings, the things that we need, the provisions of the homestead. God promises that those will be given to us. If we focus our time and our effort on doing the things that he has called us to do, then we don't have to worry about oh shoot, we're not going to have the time or the money or the whatever to get the things that we need. God knows that we need them and he's going to provide them for us, sometimes in ways that we don't expect, and he'll provide us what we need, not necessarily great abundance or wealth or riches or anything like that. He'll give us exactly what we need, what we need to accomplish his purposes, and so that's a verse. I go back to a lot. I feel like the stress and the worry can tend to crop up in a lot of ways, but going back to seek first his kingdom and he'll provide us exactly what we need.
Speaker 1:So good. Is there anything that you want to add about building your blog and what people can expect when they click on?
Speaker 2:It's still in very early stages. I have maybe 10 posts up already but I'm hoping to continue just kind of documenting our transition from kind of this quasi homestead, mostly off grid with a few cheats in there, into going forward in this and how our family develops, how our homestead develops, and maybe share things that I find inspirational every once in a while. But I'm hoping it'll turn into kind of just a lifestyle documentary for people who are interested in these kind of things, to see how you can start at the beginning and move your way into what we're doing in the future. So it'll be a surprise to me too, depending on how our life goes Sure.
Speaker 1:All right to be continued. Thank you so much, Joe. You can find her blog in the show notes at the bottom of the episode, and you look forward to seeing your journey on Rappel.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much.
