There’s so much information in the pages of our book, Small-Scale Homesteading we know it will both inspire and educate you!
Stephanie and my collective knowledge has been distilled down to what we wished we’d known when we started down this homesteading road.
…And I know that’s said about a lot of books by a lot of authors, and I understand why- we write what we know. We end up knowing a lot about what we love.
And we love homesteading, in all it’s beautiful forms.
The twist with this book is that these pages hold BOTH of our combined experiences and the different ways we’ve settled into doing different homesteading skills. We’re obviously big believers in there being more than one way to do just about everything.
How our Book Took Root
Stephanie had written her second cookbook and I was planning another Winter Farmers Markets in White Bear Lake. I was expanding the event to include classes during the markets. I asked Stephanie to teach one of her fermentation classes at a market. We hit it off right away. But living on opposite sides of the city with busy lives during a pandemic kept us acquaintances over the next few years.
Jump to the spring of 2021 at my monthly book club. I was sharing a rhubarb shrub cocktail with my gals and they all loved it so much they wanted the recipe, and urged me to write a blog on it. I knew Stephanie had a recipe for this specific shrub in her book, Weck Small Batch Preserving and so I asked if she wanted to collaborate on the blog…
We used Stephanie’s recipe in the Rhubarb Shrub Love blog and we even did a book giveaway. While talking details and chatting about that project Stephanie mentioned that she’d recently pitched and gotten the go ahead on another book idea to her publisher. But she was feeling hesitant to tackle all the writing for a book on homesteading. She asked if I’d be interested in doing something like that together… and it lit a fire under both of us!
“Instead of self-sufficiency, how about communal abundance?”
Quote from Michelle’s intro
Planning The Book
So we presented our updated outline to her publisher at Skyhorse, they accepted, we negotiated and started flushing out ideas and projects, taking photos and having lots of conversations about what we wanted this book to feel like.
The rest is captured within the pages of our beautiful love letter to urban and suburban homesteading!
We both knew we wanted reading it to feel like hanging out with some friends who happen to be experts (but not the snotty kind 😉) sharing information and a cup of tea (or coffee, kombucha or maybe a cocktail) and feeling like you can accomplish any project you read about- but without feeling like you had to do it all. But that’s a pretty long title, so after LOTS of title changes we ended up settling on a final. “Small-Scale Homesteading: A Sustainable Guide to Gardening, Keeping Chickens, Maple Sugaring, Preserving the Harvest, and More” – which isn’t much shorter- ha!
And what a fun ride it has been writing my first book. I got to dig deeper in so many of my favorite topics; from my obsession with soil life to the way pollinators are welcomed to our gardens, favorite recipes and chicken keeping hacks. We even get to share some truly inspirational stories of others in our homesteading community. There are amazing people doing amazing things in cities across America.
We believe any home can be a homestead, and any person can be a homesteader. A core belief of ours is that many of us making ‘small changes’ will have a larger impact than a few of us making ‘all the changes’ ever could. So, we break down some of the basics and how to get started in the book!
Community at the Core
This is also why we include community in the book. As urban/suburban homesteaders, we’re not working with acres of land. But we do have access to amazing neighbors with varying talents and interests.
We encourage you to draw on those talents and skills so we each get to do more of what we love, while giving others the chance to share what they love.
(Hi Farmer Jesse of Edgie’s Veggies)
Together we’ll create a more thriving community, plus it is just more fun!
We can’t wait for you to get our book dirty with seed starting and kitchen projects.
In case you haven’t ordered you book yet, here’s the LINK to get your own copy.
Cheers to your own journey of Small-Scale Homesteading!
-In Community
Michelle + Stephanie
I'd love to hear your thoughts!