Managing Failures on the Homestead
Learning to Manage Failure and Disappointment.
Reading Time: 6 minutes
Gain tips for managing failures on the homestead and learn how to bounce back to growing crops and raising livestock successfully.
by Wren Everett
A strange side effect comes from browsing homesteading blogs, websites, and magazines. Between the glossy photographs of lush gardens, unblemished baskets of produce, happy, healthy animals, and smiling profile pictures, you get the impression that everyone else’s homestead life exists in a well-lit, artfully composed rural bliss. Even though we logically know it’s not true, it’s easy to believe that every article is written by super-successful homesteaders who have everything figured out, every plant in the garden is over-productive, and every animal is in perfect condition.
Then, when we look up from the computer or magazine page, the reality that greets us can be absolutely underwhelming. It seems like no one photographs what 99 percent of homestead life actually looks like. Of course, we get to celebrate that beautiful tomato or our newborn lambs, but all of us in Reality Land know that plenty of weeds, hornworms, and predator-killed chickens paved the way. A fellow homesteader friend once said, “If your house looks like the homesteading magazines, then you’re likely spending too much time decorating and not enough time homesteading.”
Because of this illusion of perfection, common elements of our lives, like failure and disappointment, are often little-discussed topics. As a result, when things aren’t going well for you in your neck of the woods, and the glossy magazines and blissed-out blogs are taunting you, it may feel like you’re the only one who hasn’t figured it out.
But you’re not alone. The truth is, everyone experiences multiple rounds of failure during their homesteading years. It’s a matter of course, a rite of passage and just plain reality. So, as someone who’s had a heaping serving of homesteading failure and disappointment, I’d like to share some tips and tricks we’ve used to help you keep going.
Animal Failure
When we first got Muscovy ducks, I was delighted. They free-ranged on our acreage, gobbled up bugs and weeds, and were beautiful to watch dance across the pond. Though they didn’t lay many eggs, we secreted away a few of them for mega-sized omelets and let them hatch the rest themselves. Everything seemed perfect, and as I watched fluffy, newly hatched little peeps run after their mother, I remember declaring that they were a perfect homestead animal.
Then, suddenly, they weren’t. As the ducklings grew, their mother insisted on taking them off our land. She would push herself under fences and wriggle through holes that she created, leading them to who knows where. She taught the other ducks, too, and we spent several hours each day patching holes and chasing ducks off our neighbor’s property with plenty of apologies. Worst of all, they crossed the busy road in front of our house. When they were on our land, they used their new fence-busting skills to eat the onions and chives out of the garden. Duck soon became a “four-letter word.”
It wasn’t worth keeping the ducks anymore. They were taking too much and giving too little back. The ducks were rounded up one last time, bid a not-so-fond farewell, and found their resting place in the chest freezer. As I laid them side-by-side next to frozen berries and the ice cube trays, I started tearing up. Three years of work trying to breed free-range waterfowl turned into stew. The ducks had been my responsibility, so I took the failure personally.
But, as he often does, my husband brought me back to Earth by summing up the situation: Muscovy ducks weren’t a good fit for our land. With their small size and our (apparently) abundantly permeable fence line, the infrastructure on our land had proved it wasn’t sufficient to keep them safely contained. That helped me see it was okay to attempt new livestock, but if it started being more trouble than it was worth, it was also all right to change course. I hadn’t failed. I gained three years of experience with Muscovy ducks, six roasts for the winter, and a few extra gray hairs.
I planted squash seeds in the now-vacant duck house as a reminder of that lesson. It was full of soiled bedding, and the squash relished it. As they climbed up the walls, blossomed, and fruited on the roof in haphazardly ridiculous fashion, I couldn’t help but smile at the nature of homestead life, full of ups, downs, and unexpected fertilizer.
Unforeseen Weather and Garden Failure
As a total novice, I’d made a few mistakes through the first unsteady years of gardening. However, with it being my fourth year, I felt confident that with my plan and plants in hand, this would be the best I’d ever had. Careful applications of mulch hedged in my garlic and onions, and the beds rotated so the nightshade, allium, and brassica families were all in fresh soil. So many rocks had been pulled from my stony, hilltop ground that I started to see plain ol’ dirt when I dug! As the spring plants grew tall and the summer plants sprouted, I surveyed my vegetable kingdom with a swell of satisfaction. I was finally going to pull in a harvest I could preserve this year…I knew it! We’d have another notch in our self-sufficiency belt.
back on-track.
Then summer came. The sky turned a steely blue-gray. The temperatures soared. The ground dried until it cracked into pottery shards. Our area of the Ozarks endured an incredible heat wave and drought that kept the thermometer well past 100 during the day and nary a cloud to be seen on the horizon for weeks. I learned the very hard way that plants shut down when the temperatures are that hot for that long. Even with my precious cache of off-grid water carefully distributed, I watched helplessly as the beans shriveled, the Swiss chard entered a non-growing, inch-tall stasis, the embryonic tomatoes dropped green off the vine, and the lush, beautiful squash vines turned into brown dust.
Finding Fortitude in Failure
I would be lying if I said there weren’t some clenched fists and rather childish tears shed while standing in the crispy remains of my spring hopes.
Once I washed my face and put my big girl pants back on, I accepted that which I couldn’t control. An inescapable drought was the reality, plain and simple. And I could see silver linings in the non-existent clouds.
Despite the drought, some plants still grew, giving me silent guidance on what to plant in future summers. Would you believe that turnips were one of those tough-as-nails plants? The plants that survived were incredibly tough representations of their cultivars, which means my saved survivor seed will be pre-vetted for drought tolerance. And, as my husband watched me huff and puff in frustration over my fruitless okra, he quietly and kindly reminded me of another truth from this year: even if I hadn’t gotten much from the garden, the soil had been vastly improved from the previous year with fewer rocks, more compost, deeper soil, and a few salty tears.
With a garden, there’s always another chance for the next season’s attempt. Once the drought mercifully ended and it began to rain again, I gave thanks and rushed out to start again with fall planting. Crispy-fried bean plants gave way to rutabaga, daikon radish, and beets. Cabbages covered the ground where corn failed. And somehow, my watermelons made it through, giving me a sweet prize I didn’t feel I deserved but was surely grateful for.
The self-sufficient backwoods, or homestead life, is full of wonderful ups and discouraging downs. We reap some of the richest rewards and suffer devastating personal losses. But it’s precisely those frustrations, failures, and disappointments, not the successes that develop character. The unflappable homesteaders of the past had to, by necessity, develop that quiet, inner toughness that made them face adversity with grit and tenacity. We get the chance to carry on that same tradition of inner fortitude that will help us weather the storm and come out singing on the other side (to the great perplexity of the city folks who will never quite know what to make of us).
This winter, I’ll be rolling out the crust for duck-house pumpkin pie and trimming ridiculously resilient turnips for dinner. I hope you find the same strange, wonderful gifts on your land and learn the tough but healthy lessons about handling failure and disappointment.
Wren Everett and her husband quit their teaching jobs in the city and moved back to the land on 12 acres in the Ozarks. There, they are learning to live as modern peasants: off-grid, as self-sufficient as possible, and quite happily.
Originally published in the September/October 2024 issue of Countryside and Small Stock Journal and regularly vetted for accuracy.
