I can tell you for sure because it is still there on the bookshelf, that the first adult book I ever bought, and I don’t mean the racy type, was John Seymour’s ‘Self Sufficiency.’ I bought it when I was about fourteen, probably with a book token given as a present, a good use for it because back then I wasn’t a great reader; I much preferred being outside, making stuff, various woodwork projects mostly, and my model railway, though by then that re-creation of an idealised tiny world was losing its appeal.

That period of winter solitude in the Salmon River canyon is treasured by the handful of year around residents as well as a needed reprieve for the local outfitters and guest ranches in Idaho’s back country. After a full year of guiding, guesting, gardening & going, we cram all the weekends we missed throughout the year into a lump of liquid days… and call it ‘January.’ Greg and I celebrate that gift of time to pamper ourselves in pleasurable pursuits and creature comforts. In between reading great books, journaling and crafts, Greg and I can be found working on the next years’ firewood supply, repairing and oiling the tack, and cracking walnuts that river friends supply us with. The rhythm of these placid weeks are savored, giving further reason to be grateful for the opportunity to live where the wind is your only neighbor.

Choosing to light our home with candles is perhaps a radical lifestyle decision. To do this successfully, this choice benefits from the company of a few other accommodating choices. Candle lighting is not just a lone choice, it is part of a collection of choices. To help make candle light do-able and affordable, I rarely ever cook after dark. Our home is lit with natural light during the day and whatever cooking and cleaning is done during those hours as those jobs require more light. We also rarely ever have more than 2 candles burning at once. Often we share a lone candle for our evening activities which are usually reading, writing or occasionally a board or card game like Cribbage.

In the winter of 2011, Daniel mentioned a fourteen-year-old student of his who had spent a whole month eating only foods gathered from the wild. “Could we go for two days on the hand-harvested food we have here?’ he asked. “Let’s give it a try!” I responded with my usual enthusiasm. We assembled the ingredients on the table. Everything on that table had passed through our hands. We knew all the costs and calories associated with it. No hidden injustice, no questionable pesticides. We felt joy at living in such an edible world.

One place to start is to look at how you relate to your community. If you stay on your homestead and don’t connect with your larger community or neighborhood, you deprive yourself of opportunities for many kinds of mutual support. On the other hand, if you freely help and/or fairly barter with your neighbors and local businesses, your chances of long term success will be greater, and you’ll have a community that actively cares about your well-being.

Market gardening is becoming more and more popular as an enterprise for the small farm these days as the demand for fresh locally grown food continues to grow. Here at our farm we’ve dabbled in it as our search for the perfect homestead livelihood continues and it always seems to create conflicting interest and values for us. In days gone by, the small commercial farm was also a subsistence homestead, but in our cash based society of today, doing both is becoming more and more difficult. As the pressure to produce money grows, the time, energy, and resources for the small projects necessary on a subsistence homestead fall by the wayside, not to mention the deeper values that are likely what attracted you to farming in the first place.