Growing food, raising kids, building community.
Welcome to Practical Homesteading—a place for practical, funny, deeply lived writing about growing food, feeding a family, raising animals, raising kids, and making a meaningful life from an imperfect patch of land in southeastern Wisconsin.
Here you will find garden and food-preservation how-tos, honest seasonal updates, family-friendly Wisconsin outings, local-food stories, and the ongoing experiments of a household learning what it can grow, make, preserve, and share.
If you love a useful kitchen project, a garden that does not always behave, food with a story behind it, and the reality of family life in the middle of it all, you are in the right place.
Hi, I’m Faith.
I am a wife, working mother of two, environmental professional, gardener, animal caretaker, lifelong reader, amateur historian, and aspiring writer.
I also tend to be a perfectionist and a ruminator—which is perhaps why I keep a blog. It gives me a place to turn the ordinary chaos of family life, animals, garden weeds, preservation projects, and half-formed ideas into something I can understand, remember, and share.
This blog is where I practice the craft of paying attention, turning experience into words, and sharing what I learn.
It is also the beginning of an anthology: a growing record of what we are learning about food, family, place, work, and the kind of life we are trying to build.
Growing Up on a Wisconsin Dairy Farm
I grew up on a family dairy farm in southeastern Wisconsin during the 1990s, a hard decade when small operations were disappearing quickly.
Our family milked about 60 cows through years of economic stress. In 2001, we sold the herd and rented the land to a larger operation. My five older sisters had mostly moved on by then, and my parents took what we called “city jobs.” My mom worked at the local grocery store; my dad first became a farmhand and later worked for a local drilling company.
They also bought beef cattle for me to raise through my teen years.
At the time, I was not grateful for it.
The Girl Who Couldn’t Wait to Leave
As a teenager, I was determined to get out of Dodge County and go to college in Madison. Books came easily to me, and I wore that like armor. I thought I was smarter than farm life, better than staying put, and certain I had everything figured out.
The world I grew up in was already changing. Before my dad took over from his father, farmers traveled no more than a mile to access all their land. By the time he changed careers, some farmers had to drive an hour or more to reach the farthest corners of theirs.
But I was young, restless, and ready for somewhere else.
I went to college, graduated from graduate school, and began working as an environmental professional. I traveled, lived near Green Bay, stayed in more hotels than I could count, and loved the freedom of my twenties.
All along, though, I quietly loved making things from scratch.
In college, I made pizza from scratch—except for the cheese—and it took about three times longer than necessary. I once ruined zucchini bread by confusing tablespoons with teaspoons of salt. Later, I bought a Crock-Pot that made my dorm floor jealous of the dinner smells coming from my room.
I did not call it homesteading then. I just liked learning how to make things.
Coming Back by Choice
I started dating my husband when I was 19, and after a long courtship, we married when I was 27. He did not grow up on a farm, but he found agriculture fascinating. Together, through trial and error, we found common ground in family, country living, growing food, and raising animals.
Then I became a mother.
Motherhood changed the way I saw nearly everything. It made me want a fuller, more rooted version of life—not because I had failed to leave, but because I could finally see what I wanted to return to.
During the first year of our son’s life, we were living on 18 acres near Green Bay. It was beautiful land, but during the isolation of the pandemic, it also taught us something important: land does not raise children, and a property line is not the same thing as community.
As we thought about having a second child, we made a deliberate choice to move back near our hometown outside Mayville, Wisconsin.
I had watched my family’s relationship to farming change through necessity. I returned to this life freely.
What We’re Building Now
Today, our household includes two children, pigs, chickens, turkeys, gardens, a separate potato patch, lots of kitchen projects, and a long list of things we are still figuring out.
We grow vegetables, preserve food, raise animals, make maple syrup, experiment with small-batch products like Garden Heat, and try to make the most of every season. Some years we have seven pails of onions curing in the basement. Some years the weeds win. Often, both things are true at once.
I write here about:
- Growing, preserving, and cooking garden food.
- Raising pigs, poultry, and other animals as part of a working homestead system.
- Practical household projects, from freezer meals to food storage.
- Family-friendly Wisconsin outings and local stories.
- The honest lessons, failures, funny moments, and small wins that come with trying to build a rooted life.
I do not have a perfect system. I do have a real one.
Why I Write
At 36, I am still learning that I do not need to be the smartest person in the room. I need to be someone who shows up, learns, pays attention, and shares what may be useful.
Practical Homesteading is where I do that.
I write because I enjoy the work of turning a season into words. I write because someday this growing collection may become a book, a writing career, a business, or simply a record my children and I can return to and say: this is what our life felt like while we were building it.
Mostly, I write because I believe ordinary work—feeding people, tending animals, growing food, making meals, helping neighbors, and learning from mistakes—is worth noticing.
The Mission Behind This Work
Practical Homesteading is guided by a simple belief: growing food, raising kids, and building community can help us create more capable, connected lives.
Read the full mission behind Practical Homesteading here.
Start Here
If you are new, these are good places to begin:
- Buying Meat from a Farmer: A Complete Guide to Bulk Meat, Freezers, and Butchers — A practical guide to buying local meat in bulk.
- The Quiet Wealth of These Fields — A reflection on rural community, barter, and the value of neighbors.
- How Our Family of Four Took a 5‑Day Road Trip for Under $1,000 — How our family of four went on a budget road trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
- Outdoor Wood Furnace and Firewood Prep for a Wisconsin Winter — Learn about our setup for burning wood to heat our house and hot water in winter.
Stay in Touch
If you would like garden, preservation, family, local-life, and practical-homesteading notes delivered occasionally, join my email list.
Or, if you are a local reader interested in our maple syrup, pork, Garden Heat, or future products, contact us. We’d love to hear from you!
