Hello everyone! My name is Ashley, I’m so glad you’ve joined me. I’d like to share a little about myself. First of all I am a wife and mom to 3 great kids. I am a registered nurse and I work full-time. I also personally consider myself a homesteader, since I cook a lot from scratch, grow a lot of our food in the summer, keep chickens and I kinda want all the animals, but this is where we are so far. I feel strongly about clean living. Of course, it’s not 100% possible, but I truly believe as long as you are aware of the things to avoid and try to find healthy alternatives you’re that much better off. I went from being pretty much on my own since age 17, city girl, working 3 jobs at a time in high school, college girl, wife and mommy, RN, entrepreneur, homesteader, baker, gardener, chicken mom, and I constantly aspire to learn and do more. I am an ever-evolving woman and only God knows what I’ll be up to next year, maybe some of you can relate!
So a few years ago I started learning about the toxic and unhealthy ingredients in our everyday foods, personal care products, and cleaning supplies. I’m a nurse, when I discover something new I tend to dive right in on ALL the research, barely coming up for air. It’s just what I do. I did it with pregnancy, and all things parenting, I learned to sew and started an Etsy shop selling cloth diapers when we were poor and I was in school, and I made our own baby food, I guess I’ve always had a crunchy mom side that was dying to come out. After all, growing up The Little House on the Prairie was my favorite show. When the pandemic happened I became acutely aware of our need for some changes, we needed to adopt a healthier more natural way of life. I felt worried about my job security during that time so I decided to work on building up a nicely stocked pantry and tried to find other ways to become more self-sufficient. I decided the two most important things I could do were to start a garden, learn how to can food, and get myself a few chickens. That way, at least if we lost my income or something crazy happened, we’d at least have eggs for protein and healthy food to eat. Right? It seemed totally logical to me at the time. I disregarded the fact that I lived in a neighborhood that didn’t even allow chickens, and I had never even been able to keep a houseplant alive….. but I was determined to learn all the things and figure it out. So I dove right in.
I buried myself in books, and websites, and watched YouTube videos for months. I learned a lot. My husband tells me I reinvented myself that year. I was no longer the woman he married, he says it in an admiring and impressed way, he says he could never get bored with me because I’m always surprising him and changing. I was a bit of a city girl when we met and he was a country boy. I only knew how to cook easy things, mostly from boxes or packages. I specifically remember looking up recipes back then and if I came across the word yeast, or it talked about making a roux, I was automatically OUT. That was just too much for me. I had no idea how to use yeast or make bread if it hadn’t been frozen first, and I shied away from any recipes that contained more than 4 or 5 ingredients. When remembering that, I must agree with my husband that I really did completely reinvent myself. Pretty soon I was baking our bread items, making sourdough, growing lots of veggies, shopping the farmer’s markets weekly, canning food to put up for the winters, cooking mostly from scratch, and tending chickens.
My gracious husband took this crazy little trip with me, encouraging and supporting all my ideas. He built me a great chicken coop, built shelves for my growing pantry, and did most of the hard grunt work for my raised bed gardens. I went to buy exactly 5 chickens that spring, I researched the breeds I wanted and went to the store and ended up with 8 chickens because chicken math is real. Then the unexpected happened, 2 of them started crowing, even though I intentionally selected only pullets or females. Surprise! So we did what every aspiring homesteader does and we took that as a sign to start house hunting and looked for property. I thought for sure I could hide a few quiet hens in my backyard but I would get busted with roosters. We found a house with 10 acres and moved. We built another even bigger garden from scratch, my poor husband worked so hard for me moving dirt and mulch and building garden boxes all over again, and he moved that big solid chicken coop he’d just built, and we even planted a bunch of fruit trees and berry bushes so we can grow our own fruit someday. The man is a saint who tirelessly supports my dreams. So now we have privacy, peace, and the freedom to do whatever we want to do here. We thank those mouthy roosters every day for pushing us forward on this journey.
