By Hannah Heath

This is a guest post from LIRA partners Rev. Timm & Hannah Heath, whose humble homestead grows in New York State’s southern tier.

At any given moment of the day my husband can bellow a resounding “WHO ARE WE?” and from every room will come a ringing response of “Heaths! Heaths! Heaths!” Our family started this call and response in 2016 when we finalized the international adoption process and welcomed two children, ages 9 and 2 ½, into our family. At the time we were living in a parsonage in rural Wisconsin and our kids were 9, 4, 2 ½, and almost 2. I tended a small vegetable garden, more for the therapeutic opportunity of pulling weeds rather than producing any impressive amount of veg. I did, however, produce an impressive amount of weeds. My weedy thumbs weren’t an issue though since we were not real homesteaders.

Within a year, our circumstances had changed drastically. My husband took a call as an LCMS pastor to a parish in rural New York and we moved out to float in limbo for a few months as we embarked as first-time home buyers. During the process of house hunting I stubbornly kept the search at a minimum of 5 acres because, according to The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency: The Classic Guide for Realists and Dreamers by John Seymour, you could really achieve epic homesteader status with a cow and crop rotation (and bees, and chickens, and a pond, and an orchard!) and all the rest if you had 5 acres. By this point in our life I had read and reread many books on self-sufficiency, gardening, permaculture, etc. My mental lists had extensive notes on what was best for starting a homestead. In the end, we settled on Old Reliable, a 1890s house that had sat vacant for a few years on just one acre of land. Old Reliable had a wheelchair ramp already installed for our oldest daughter who is a full-time wheelchair user, it had a window over the kitchen sink, it had working indoor plumbing. It had everything we needed. It did not seem ideal for starting the homestead I envisioned, but I consoled myself with the fact that, after all, we were not homesteaders.

Three days after moving into Old Reliable, our three year old son Roman had his first seizure. I clearly remember that morning. Roman had been unusually quiet and I jumped at the opportunity to take my pregnant self on a walk in the still of the morning and watch a praying mantis pose along the petals of a salmon pink chrysanthemum. As the morning sunlight bathed the overgrown lot with warm light, I imagined the next spring and summer, our baby would be a few months old, perhaps Roman (who had developmental delays) would be walking and talking by then. Maybe I would have a couple chickens, beehives, and a productive vegetable garden! I started to see ways to fit Old Reliable into the homesteader life that I longed for. I walked back inside to get Roman ready for the day and our lives turned upside down as I called 911 for the first time. By the end of the week, Roman would have multiple diagnosis, I would suffer a miscarriage, and my homesteading dreams would be buried under the new schedule of doctor visits, therapy appointments, and that dampening effect called grief.

That winter my husband and I ordered some trees for Spring, one as a memorial for our lost child, and a few pear trees simply because we like pears. A few months later a friend dropped off a couple day-old chicks and the kids and I started learning how to care for them. A couple weeks after that the post office called to let us know that our ducklings had arrived, 4 little waddling, quacking, tick control critters. The trees arrived as tiny bare sticks (we planted one much too close to a building) and all but one survived. That year’s growing season was spent with me miserably out of commission with morning sickness and we gratefully welcomed our son Ezekiel in early 2019. Our flock of ducks grew thanks to homeschool science and a borrowed incubator. The overgrowth on the property was banished to just a few strongholds as the weed barrier cloth (completely enmeshed with weeds) was painstakingly dug out. I was still very good at growing weeds. I spent the long winter months reading seed catalogs and Mother Earth News articles, dreaming of the day when I would have the time, the energy, the verve, to homestead properly.

January of 2020 my husband was exuberant with anticipation. I distinctly remember him proclaiming that this would be our year! We had laid the ground work for a lot of good things to get momentum come Spring of 2020. I told him not to say such things because every time we’d been so optimistic, things had gone terribly wrong. “What could go wrong?” he asked. Less than two months later he sent me a text asking for a grocery list in case our state really did go ahead with shutting everything down. In response, I sent him a craigslist post of a dairy cow. He laughed, I laughed. A few weeks later we reassessed our family situation and I called the number on the cow listing. The cow had sold. That was probably for the best since the vague plan was to house the bovine in the garage. But that conversation opened the way for getting two miniature dairy goats and a pair of meat wethers which were easily housed in the sunroom built off the back of the garage. We hatched out ducklings and raised some for meat, though we did not process them ourselves. The garden beds had more vegetables, herbs, and flowers than weeds. I fell into a cozy rhythm of homemaking where milk that was over 24 hours old was moved to the “baking milk” section of the fridge, my kids would go and gather eggs for their breakfast as they did their morning chores; I began to daydream about homesteading once again. The pear trees continued to not die, but they didn’t seem to be growing all that much either. They certainly didn’t seem to be thriving.

Last year, 2021, I spent the warm growing season abysmally ill pregnant with our 6^th child. Everything was in a holding pattern from about February onward. I dried off the two goats and we went back to buying “cow milk” as the kids describe it. The main vegetable crop was a pile of butternut squash planted and tended entirely by the chickens. A predator came and wiped out all but one of our ducks. I ordered more ducklings. I grew impressive weeds and my goats demolished them. Our daughter Theodora Thankful (aka Baby Dot) was born in October on the four year anniversary of our miscarriage. Her name means “gift of God” and the seeds of hopes that lay dormant for those years seemed to gradually sprout and grow right along with her.

This week, I stopped to watch a praying mantis poised on the top of a roll of fencing that I was busy moving. I had spent the morning picking vegetables to fill the baskets of our two CSA subscribers. It was a bright afternoon and Roman, who has learned how to walk, was off at summer school. Dot was napping, and the other kids were playing with our doelings in the backyard. We were taking down the old fencing to make way for a portable electric livestock option to use with our five goats and livestock guardian dog. The 20 ducks and 2 geese were watching my progress and muttering to one another about how I really should be giving them treats instead of messing about with wire. One of the pear trees was towering over me. As I watched it swaying in the breeze, I realized I should prune it soon. Indeed, I should have pruned it already. How in the world did it grow so quickly after so many years of barely any growth? Perhaps it spent the past few years sending down roots and getting acquainted with the soil while waiting for the right season of life to burst forth.

I thought about this LIRA blog and our introductory post. What could I tell you about us? Who are we?

We are Heaths, and we have been quietly homesteaders all along.