If you have a homestead of any kind, failures are inevitable. And the beginning of a new year is the perfect time to create action plans on how to prevent missteps in the coming year.
In this podcast episode, I'll share my 4-step Homestead Reset Framework that I use for figuring out why certain aspects of my homestead failed, and how to make it better in the coming year.
Podcast Episode Highlights
Podcast Feedback
Did you enjoy listening to this episode? Please drop a comment below or leave a review to let us know. This can help other folks learn about this podcast and we also really appreciate the feedback!
Podcast Episode Resources and Links Mentioned
Read the blog version of this podcast episode here: https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2024/01/how-to-do-a-homestead-reset.html
Learn more about the Old-Fashioned on Purpose planner here: www.prairieplanner.com
Sign up for my weekly newsletter here: http://theprairiehomestead.com/letter
Get your Garden Soil Test Kit here: http://theprairiehomestead.com/soiltest
Order my NEW book Old-Fashioned on Purpose now and get exclusive bonuses! http://oldfashionedbook.com/
Have a message you want to share with the world? Apply to be a guest on the Old-Fashioned on Purpose podcast here: https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/podcast-guest-application
Weekly musings from my homestead: http://theprairiehomestead.com/letter
My essays on an old-fashioned life: www.prairiephilosophy.com
My homesteading tutorials & recipes: www.theprairiehomestead.com
Our Wyoming-raised, grass-finished beef: http://genuinebeefco.com
Jill on Twitter: http://twitter.com/homesteader
Jill on Instagram: @jill.winger
Jill on Facebook: http://facebook.com/theprairiehomestead
If you have a homestead of any kind, failures are inevitable. And the beginning of a new year is the perfect time to create action plans on how to prevent missteps in the coming year.
In this podcast episode, I'll share my 4-step Homestead Reset Framework that I use for figuring out why certain aspects of my homestead failed, and how to make it better in the coming year.
Podcast Episode Highlights
Podcast Feedback
Did you enjoy listening to this episode? Please drop a comment below or leave a review to let us know. This can help other folks learn about this podcast and we also really appreciate the feedback!
Podcast Episode Resources and Links Mentioned
Read the blog version of this podcast episode here: https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2024/01/how-to-do-a-homestead-reset.html
Learn more about the Old-Fashioned on Purpose planner here: www.prairieplanner.com
Sign up for my weekly newsletter here: http://theprairiehomestead.com/letter
Get your Garden Soil Test Kit here: http://theprairiehomestead.com/soiltest
Order my NEW book Old-Fashioned on Purpose now and get exclusive bonuses! http://oldfashionedbook.com/
Have a message you want to share with the world? Apply to be a guest on the Old-Fashioned on Purpose podcast here: https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/podcast-guest-application
Weekly musings from my homestead: http://theprairiehomestead.com/letter
My essays on an old-fashioned life: www.prairiephilosophy.com
My homesteading tutorials & recipes: www.theprairiehomestead.com
Our Wyoming-raised, grass-finished beef: http://genuinebeefco.com
Jill on Twitter: http://twitter.com/homesteader
Jill on Instagram: @jill.winger
Jill on Facebook: http://facebook.com/theprairiehomestead
Whenever I'm talking to homesteaders of any kind from any part of the country, whether they have a big property or a small one, I would say the reoccurring theme that I hear over and over again that's universal to all of us is that so many times projects on the homestead our best laid plans, our big food production goals, they just don't happen like we want them to, or that we think they will. So I think this is a topic that is really important to start to get cozy with if you're going to be a homesteader, or you already are a homesteader, because failure is inevitable. And when I say the word failure, I think to a lot of culture that has a lot of negative connotations, to me, I tend to be a lot more comfortable with that word. When I say it, it's not something that's final or finished, but it is a necessary part of learning and growth. And I think that's often why people don't like to start new things, whether that's homesteading or a business or a new hobby or a new sport is that no one likes the feeling of being a beginner, because beginning something requires a lot of mess ups, a lot of failures, if you will, and a lot of missteps. And so whether you are a new homesteader or an experienced one, failure is going to be a big part. of your journey. I know for me, over the years, it's helped me a lot to create a bit of a process on how to work through failures and struggles and disappointments. And it gives me a chance to extract as much learning as I can from those situations. So that's what we're going to talk about today. And by the end of this episode, you should have a rock solid action plan on how to take the things that didn't go so hot in 2023 and turn them into a huge learning win for 2024. So welcome to the Old Fashioned On Purpose podcast. This is a show where we talk about the things that progress and modern culture has kind of taken away from us. And how we can get all that good stuff back. I'm your host Jill Winger, and I have been homesteading for well over a decade. My family and I live in a crazy hard climate for growing food, the wide open prairies of Wyoming. And I am no stranger to tons of mistakes, tons of failures, and doing everything basically the hard way before I figure it out. So I feel very qualified to talk on this topic. And I hope that some of my strategies. will help you as well. So last episode, I talked about the big wins, big lessons for 2023. So I'm not going to go over those in detail. Again, you'll have to go back to that episode and listen. And today I really want to hone in on the homestead pieces of this, although The framework that I'm going to teach you today is going to apply to really any area of your life where you're trying to extract some lessons and progress. But like any other year, 2023 absolutely had some wins in terms of food production and homesteading and it had some big, meh, didn't go so hot. I think some of our big mess ups which are kind of par for the course for us. Like there's seems like there's always a crop and I hear a lot of other people say this too. There's always some crop that just like bombs in a given year, you'll have one where it's a bumper harvest and you'll have others are just like, why didn't this work? And for us, we've had really good potato and onion harvests. This past year was dismal, depressing. I could not get squash to grow to save my life. The year prior, I had a literal mountain of squash, of pumpkins, and I had to, like, give them away to everyone, and then I had to feed the rest of the pigs. or chickens or whatever. And this past year I couldn't grow a single one. I think I grew one pumpkin like the size of a cantaloupe. That was it. The end. So that wasn't great. We didn't milk very consistently. We had a calf and then life just got out of control in various aspects of our businesses. And so we just put the calf on the cow and said, it'll be fine. So I didn't get as much cheese making done as I would have liked to this year. Yeah, so there were just things I'm like, I wish we could have done it better. I was really distracted this year. Last episode, I talked about how my word for the year is streamlined. My word for this year is streamlined. And that's very much coming as the result of last year, not being streamlined. Now, one little caveat with that, I think this is just I'm just saying this for my own benefit, I suppose, a lot of people I think they look at our life in the past with all the different ventures and businesses and such. And they probably would be like, well, duh, Jill, you did it to yourself. And I totally did do it to myself. And I'm well aware of that. But I also think that there are times when certain opportunities arise that you need to say yes to, that you should say yes to. And sometimes that creates a measure of chaos. And I don't think chaos in and of itself is a bad thing. I don't think we want to live in a state of chaos all the time. But I think there's a balance between chaos and order, and we need a little bit of both. And so I'm coming out of a season of happy, for the most part, chaos, growth, chaos, expansion, chaos, good things happening, saying yes to amazing opportunities, chaos, and now I'm getting strategic and streamlined for a time. And so I, I attribute a lot of our missteps from 2023 and the. world of homesteading to be just too much going on and I wasn't managing things properly. And so I've been spending a lot of time figuring out, okay, why did this go wrong? What could I have managed differently? And how can I be taking a more active role in 2024? So, I think, before I give you the framework, which is a really cool framework called the Homestead Reset I want to just underscore the importance of this. Because, you know, right now we have all this energy and all these people chattering about goals and resolutions and we have all the contrarians talking about, Not setting goals and not setting resolutions. It's kind of funny when you start to see how social media patterns work. But this whole idea of starting fresh only works if you're willing to do something different than you've done in the past. And it goes back to a little phrase one of my horsemanship mentors used to say over and over and over again. And when I heard him say it, like I never really fully grasped it to its depth. But he would always say when we were riding, You've got to do things you've never done to get things you've never had. And, you know, sounds cute. It has a nice little rhythm to it. And I kind of understood what he was saying, right? You've got to switch up what you're trying. But, like, man, that little saying holds a lot of power. And I really sense that it's really not about horsemanship at all. It's really about life in general. Is that if we want different results, we have to do different things. We can't keep doing the same things over and over and expecting something different to happen. Which I think a lot of us would go, well, duh, that's obvious. But I don't know, in our human patterns, it doesn't always happen like that. And I know I myself have to catch myself constantly from, you know, kind of just bumbling along on these certain paths and hoping that it's going to be different at the end when I start to examine the results. Hope is not a strategy, right? We have to take a lot more ownership of those situations. And so if there were things on your homestead, which I'm guessing there are, because you're probably normal like the rest of us, there were things on your homestead you just didn't love in 2023. You cannot go into 2024 hoping they will change. I can't go in and just hope my potatoes will be better this year. I have to figure out why they did not produce like they should, and then I have to take the measures to change it. I have to do something different if I want different results. I know it sounds obvious, but it's so insane to me how often we humans don't act on those obvious things. So if we Want to avoid a Groundhog Day, you know that movie, right? A Groundhog Day style repeat of last year's mistakes. It's time to take an active role in figuring out what went wrong. And how we're going to fix it. So, without further ado, let's dive into what I call the Homestead Reset. You can do this any time of year. There is nothing magical about January 1st, right? We put so much pressure on January, I think. And don't get me wrong, I love the energy that comes with it. I love the feeling of freshness. But you can take action. Messy, imperfect, powerful action any time of year. And you should. I think we can often wait for The first of the month or the first of the year or the first of the semester or whatever we can use that as a Subconscious procrastination where we're not doing it now, right? So act now if you're listening to this episode in October do this now, right? Don't wait, but it's powerful stuff So the first thing we're gonna do there's a four there's four pieces to our homestead reset and I worked really hard So they all start with R. So I hope you appreciate that. Anyway, first up is review. This is obvious, right? I did this in my last week's episode. We're going to think about the goals that you set at the beginning of the prior year or the prior season or whenever you're doing this. And we're going to ask ourselves a few questions. So number one, were those goals actually realistic. So when I look at my, some of my goals for 2023, growing like 500 pounds of potatoes, was it realistic? Probably, because I've grown 300 pounds of potatoes in the past. But it was a stretch. And I think there were some things I didn't really set myself up for success in, but we'll talk about in the next step. The next question to ask yourself is, And this is a tricky one, you got to be honest. It might sting a little bit. Did the goals you set really matter to you? Or did you stick them on your list as you were planning for 2023 just because they looked cool? You thought maybe they'd help you kind of keep up with the Joneses, or everyone else was doing it, right? You see this a lot in the homestead world. I have totally done this. where we get this idea of what a classic traditional homesteader looks like, or what animals they have, or what skills they're doing. And we feel like we have to put them on our goal list, or check them off out of obligation. It's really easy to fall into that. And I think we all have to experiment with that and try it. But the faster you can figure out, hey, just because so and so on YouTube keeps bees, and bees are not my thing, and I don't enjoy them, doesn't mean I have to continue doing something. That I'm not loving, right? And so I think we have to be really honest with the goals. Did you not achieve them? Like, did you put them on your list for out of obligation, out of keeping up with the Joneses? Because often when you do that, your heart's not really in it to begin with, right? So that's first step is review. Second step is retrospection, okay? So consider what you did or did not do. To attain your goals. What went wrong and what went right? So in the case of my potato situation I had a goal, it was attainable, but I didn't do anything different from the previous year to really. Set myself up for success, right? So, the first question in retrospection is, did you have a plan or did I just let life happen? Well, I let life happen with my potatoes. I planted them the same way, I didn't add any amendments to the soil, really. I watered them the same way and off we went. And I was just expecting to like, almost double my yield without a lot of different effort up front. That's, Not wise, right? That wasn't setting myself up for success. Second question, did anything unexpected happen that derailed your plants? Well, they actually did in terms of the potatoes. We had a crazy wet summer, which was awesome. We had the most beautiful grass, but I also had more moisture in the ground than I'm used to and what I found when I would, you know, late summer when I dug up my potatoes and started to try to figure out what was wrong, a lot of them rotted in the ground. Like they just turned into potato mush. I haven't had that happen before because we usually don't have too much rain. We have never enough rain. But that was something out of my control. Now, I could have probably helped myself out a little bit. In, in not letting my automatic water, water as much as it did. I think I, even when we weren't getting rainstorms, I think I let my, my sprinkler go too much and I needed to manage that more. Which brings me to question number three, what parts within my control could I have done differently? I totally could have managed my water better. There were parts of the row that I figured out later were lower, so they were collecting more water. There were parts that were higher. I needed to be paying more attention to that and making adjustments. I also could have weeded more. We mulched the potatoes with a really heavy layer of straw which was good for some of the weeds. But nothing is completely foolproof when it comes to weeds. And so I didn't manage that enough. Now I'm not going to beat myself up over that because we had a heck of a summer for multiple reasons and potatoes had to just go on the back burner, but I could have done better. So if I'm going to ask what went wrong, that went wrong. I think also. I tried something new, which I'm glad I tried it, but I put the potatoes, I just kind of roughed up the ground. And I put the potatoes on the ground and then covered them with straw instead of digging them in and covering them completely with soil. Because that's a lot of work, right? So I was trying to cut some corners. And I'd heard people talk about that working. And it worked. I don't know if it worked as well as it would. If I had covered them with soil, also some of the layers of straw were too thick and I think that contributed to the potatoes rotting. So that was a learning curve as well, right? Okay, So there was review We had retrospection and number three we have So now that you've identified the gap between where you wanted to be, where you plan to be, and where you ended up, right? Those are, there's two points and there's a big chasm in the middle. We get to come up with a plan for shortening that chasm in our upcoming year or our upcoming season. So this, I think, is the step where you start to put yourself back in power, right? You're not a victim of the situation, it's not a poor me situation, but we're gonna go, okay, cool, this happened, it is what it is, now I get to put myself back in the driver's seat to figure out how to fix it. So I think the first thing I like to do when I'm creating the remedy for something that didn't go like I thought it would is I always look at, how can I gather more data about the situation? You know, sometimes that's calling a mentor, calling a friend. For me, it was when I woke up after a lot of the derailments we had early in the summer that distracted me from the potatoes, and when I got to get back out and focus on them, it was gathering data by digging down and going, Okay, which ones sprouted? Which ones didn't? How wet is the soil? Oh, it's soggy. Well, this soil is too dry. Did the straw work or did it not work? And so it was gathering data in the field. Sometimes you can gather data in a more scientific way. Like I think a lot when it comes to gardening about soil and soil fertility and soil nutrient content. One of the best ways to stop guessing is to test your soil. You guys know I'm a huge fan of Redmond at home soil tests. Use them every year. It's not. It's not the most super duper comprehensive soil test you can get, but it's simple and it's going to give you a ton of information that is very valuable for a home gardener. So you don't have to wonder, okay, was I lacking in nitrogen? Did I have too much nitrogen? Am I low in phosphorus? You know, you just have that data in your hands. And it's going to be able to help you shape your strategy for the coming gardening season. Another part of the remedy is asking myself, what measures can I put in place to reduce human air in this situation? So I, I talked about that a little bit already, you know, like mulch, if we're talking about gardening. And of course these. Reset steps apply to everything, not just gardening, but we're going to dig, we're digging into gardening for the sake of the example. A big one with gardening is the water. Like, with my potatoes, I had some over watered, some under watered, so I could have dialed in my watering system, but watering systems as a whole are a huge way to reduce human error in gardening. When we first started I never had sprinkler automation set up and I was watering things by hand or it was dependent on me remembering to water every day or put the sprinkler in the right places. Things just didn't grow as well because, you know, we get distracted. We get busy. So a huge way that I am able to grow my greenhouse and grow my raised beds and grow another row of potatoes and onions is that we automate the water. It's all on timers and systems and Christian set that up. It's not something that's in my wheelhouse, but that's a game changer. Another one with gardening is mulch. You know, if I have to weed everything by myself, by hand every day, like it's not going to happen. There's other things I'm doing in the summer and that's, you know, weeds aren't always. The end of the world. And I don't believe you have to have a perfectly pristine garden. But there comes that tipping point when you get so many weeds that it will choke out your plants. And we actually had that happen with the onions this past year. Is we had put down some fabric and, and poked holes in it. to help with the weed situation, but there was still enough grass coming up through the holes that it did choke out some of the onions. And, you know maybe we could have done something a little bit different, but mulch is good. Watering systems are good. You know, when it comes to other pieces of your homestead, maybe it's getting in a rhythm of remembering when to order chicks, you know, maybe you want to up your egg production or you want to up your meat bird production. I know something I've struggled with in the past is remembering When to order meat chicks in the right windows when the hatcheries have them available another thing It's been hard for me to remember in years past is the breeding windows for the cattle Like sometimes I kind of wake up in the fall and go. Oh, no, we forgot we missed the window We got so busy. So maybe the system that you create to reduce human error. There is Getting a planner, like the old fashioned on purpose planner, and writing that out ahead of time when you have that presence of mind, so you're able to fall back into your systems instead of expecting your brain to just remember all that, because that just isn't a thing, like, we can't remember all of this information all the time, so systems, processes, and keeping our human tendency for error as little as possible out of the forefront goes a really long way in keeping your homestead. And then the last step of our four Rs is what I call resolve. So we're going to resolve the problem. We're going to come up with our concrete solution. And I think my best advice here. is that you need to take action immediately on the information that you have collected, assimilated, written down. Even if your solution involves something that's seasonal, like gardening, or you know, milk cows, or I think this is the most important part because it's really easy to do a lot of really awesome brainstorming during certain parts of the year, then life kind of sweeps us away. And we either forget we did that, I've totally done that, or I had an awesome page of notes, it gets stuck in the back of the planner or the notebook, and I don't pick it up until the end of the year, and I forgot it existed. Or we have the best laid plans, and then we don't put that snowball of momentum into place, and they never happen. So. Let's say we're talking about the garden again, right? So if I'm going to set myself up for success with my potatoes and onions in the coming year, right now it's January, I'm not getting out there for a while to mess with the soil. But there are things I can do immediately to start helping next year's growing, or this year's growing, rather. So some ways you might do this in what you're working on is make sure you write it down. Make sure you write it down in a place you're not going to forget about it. A planner's a great option. Notes on your computer can work. I tend to lose notes on my computer more than I do in paper. It just, I have too many places I write things down. There's Word, and there's my notes app, and there's Google Drive, and there's a blog. Like, there's too many places. So, if you have a really central location that you, that's in the forefront of your mind all the time, cool. Use that. Otherwise, make sure you're writing down your thoughts and your discoveries in a place that's easy to find again. If you need to order stuff, right? Sometimes in your data collection you'll realize, Oh, I needed this tool, or I needed this seed, or I needed this thing. This would make it easier. Order it now. Don't wait. Cause you don't know when things are going to go out of stock. Some things take longer to ship than you want them to, or you just plain forget. Right? So, if you were going to try a new broadfork for digging your garden this year to try to aerate more, get that now. If you want soil testing to happen, order your soil kits now, even if it's too frozen to go get a soil sample. If you want to try different varieties of seeds that you think might work better for you this year, order them now. Do it now, don't wait. It will get away from you so quickly if you put it off. Another action you can take would be to start looking for mentors or coaches or advice that you can consume immediately, right? The hardest thing is when you're trying to, like, like, when we're talking gardens. You're out in the garden, you're trying to pivot, you're trying to improve, but you're doing it on top of planting season. And I have done that, where I'm like, Oh crap, I needed to try this differently, but I don't remember how, so I'm like Googling it or trying to read books in between planting or changing the garden. That's really stressful and that makes my blood pressure go up real fast. So try to do that education piece for yourself, or get some mentorship, get some coaching. Talk to smart people in your area, do that now, so you have the game plan ready to go. And then I mentioned this a minute ago, but I'm going to mention it again. Mark the milestones, the deadlines, the dates. Not just when you're planting, but when you need to start preparing the ground, when you need to start adding the soil amendments. We're out adding manure. We're cleaning out the barn today. We're adding that manure into the potato raw. Today on January, whatever it is, fourth. Because I, like, if I don't start thinking about it now, I don't want to wait till June, potato planting day to go, Oh no, I forgot to add nitrogen to the soil, right? So start now, put it in your planner, put it in your calendar so you don't forget and stick with it. So that is my Homestead Reset that I also use for business life projects, homesteading, gardening, animal management, kitchen management. You can use it for so many things. I think the biggest thing though is. Don't beat yourself up unnecessarily if you messed up big time last year, if you had animals die, if you had crops fail, if you didn't accomplish what you set out to accomplish, cool, acknowledge it, recognize it, analyze it, and then pick yourself up and move on. And I think the best way. To cure that anxiety, to cure those feelings of, you know, kind of feeling down in the dumps is action. Action is the antidote for anxiety. Action is the antidote for feeling like, oh, you know, it's out of my control. I don't know what to do. Like, those baby steps will take you a long way. And I, right now, am taking action in so many areas of my life that I kind of feel like I let myself down on last year. I could have done better. And like, man, as soon as I start to take action I feel better. So try it out. See what you think. No matter how many failures, and I use air quotes, failures you've had, your homestead is never too far gone. In fact, you're actually in really good company. And I've never heard an honest homesteader of any kind. I don't care how famous they are or how many YouTube followers they have or how big their homestead is. Like they always. We'll admit, if they're being honest, that yeah, there was stuff that just didn't do very well this year. And sometimes you can figure out why, and sometimes you can't. Sometimes it is completely out of your control. So roll with the punches, and know that you're always going to have some challenges. And I think that's a good thing. Because if you're not growing, you're dying, right? You got to keep growing. You want those challenges. If you had it all figured out, I think it would be kind of boring. And we homesteaders, that's why we're doing this in the first place, is we like the challenge. We don't want a boring, easy life. So I wish you a prosperous 2024 with wins and victories, but also a healthy dose. A challenge. Whew. All right, friends. This was a shorter episode, but hopefully that was helpful and action packed for you. If you would like this Homestead Reset framework typed out in a way that is easy for you to either print or just read, because I know I am definitely a visual person. I learn better by reading than listening, even though I do love podcasts. So you can find this post over on my blog, ThePrairieHomestead. com. And we're going to drop the link to it in the show notes. We turned it into a post for you. Also, this is the type of content I am sending out every Wednesday in my email newsletter. And so, we try each. month to have a framework like today, that was a framework, a how to one of my signature homestead recipes and lots of other good stuff. So if you want to join the weekly newsletter, I don't spam you. It's super easy. It's super simple. We're going to drop that link down in the show notes as well. All right, that's it for today. Thanks for listening. I hope your reset process is enlightening and I will catch you next time on the next episode of the Old Fashioned On Purpose podcast.