I’m Trading My Country House for a Town House. No, I Haven’t Given Up on Homesteading

Every time I mention the move, I get the same question. “Wait… you’re moving into town?”

I get it. For years, I’ve been the person who declared I would never live in town again. I would always live in the country, until I took my last breath one day. I’ve raised chickens. I’ve canned more tomatoes than any one family should reasonably eat. I’ve been, by most definitions, a country girl through and through. So when I tell people I’m leaving our place in the country for a house in town, the next question is always some version of: but what about the homesteading?

I’m not giving it up. I’m just right-sizing it.

The Truth I Didn’t Want to Admit

We had chickens for years, and I loved them. But if I’m honest, we could never keep up with the eggs. There’s a very specific kind of guilt that comes from watching a dozen eggs go past their prime in the fridge because you simply cannot eat them fast enough, and you’ve already given a carton to every neighbor, coworker, and mail carrier within a five-mile radius.

And here’s the other thing I realized somewhere in the last few years. I’m not actually a huge meat eater. I like chicken. I like ground beef. But I was never going to need a whole pig or cow’s worth of freezer space, no matter how much land I had to raise one on. I was homesteading for an identity I thought I was supposed to have, (hello, homeschooling stay-at-home mom!) not necessarily the one that matched how we actually eat.

Moving to town isn’t a retreat from the parts of that life that worked for us. It’s just a pivot.

What .46 Acres Can Actually Do

Here’s what people forget when they picture “homesteading”. It was never really about the acreage. It’s about growing what you eat, preserving what you grow, wasting less, buying less, knowing where your food came from.

None of that requires forty acres. Or four. It turns out it doesn’t even require the 5.5 we’re leaving behind.

With just under half an acre in town, I can still:

• Run a serious vegetable garden, with raised beds, succession planting, the whole system I’ve refined over years of trial and error
• Can, freeze, ferment, and dehydrate everything that garden produces
• Grow herbs I actually use instead of ones I thought I should grow
• Keep a compost system going

What I’m losing isn’t the ability to homestead. I’m losing the excess that ended up in waste. The overflow eggs and the freezer space I filled out of obligation rather than appetite. The land I was mowing more than I was using (okay, my BOYS were mowing more than we were using.)

A Homestead Doesn’t Need Acreage

If anything, this move is forcing me to get honest about what “self-sufficient” actually means for my household, instead of what it’s supposed to look like on paper, or on someone else’s homestead Instagram.

I don’t need ten acres to grow a good tomato. I don’t need a whole cow when I know exactly how much ground beef we go through in a season.

So yes, I’m moving to town. And yes, I’m still homesteading. It just looks like a garden that fits the space I have, a pantry stocked with what I actually preserve, and a kitchen that reflects how we really eat, not how I thought a “real” homesteader was supposed to.

Turns out you can take the girl out of the country. You just can’t take the garden out of the girl.