Lately I’ve been feeling disconnected from a cultural heritage that I can call my own. This writing is my way of processing that.

I wanted to braid the sweetgrass that grows in my garden. I read about what it represents in Indigenous cultures, and the ritual felt to meaningful to me. Having scoffed at the rituals in my Christian upbringing, I thought I simply was not a spiritual person. As I learned more about the world and the different ways of being spiritual, it turns out there’s just a mismatch between the spirituality I was offered in my own culture, and the spirituality that feels natural within me.

I didn’t braid the sweetgrass. I’ve learned enough about cultural appropriation to know that it would be disrespectful of me to pretend at a sacred ritual that isn’t mine to bare. I grow sweetgrass for its ecological benefits, and I stand at an admiring distance from the Indigenous rituals, traditions, and spirituality I read about.

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But what do I do when my own cultural heritage does not represent who I am as a person, or who I want to be? I am a white settler with Western European ancestors, half Dutch, half English. Aside from eating ollibollen on New Year’s Eve and welcoming Santa Claus into my home every Christmas, my own cultural heritage feels nebulous. I cling to some special food- and holiday-related traditions, but the traditions that survived in my family don't connect me to the land in the way I long for.

When I visited Wales, I was struck by how old the civilization there was. You could almost look through the mist and see the ghosts of your great, great, great grandfather herding sheep, or your great, great, great grandmother foraging medicines from the land. Of course, you could also see all of humanity’s worst sins in the castle tours…

It’s obvious why I don’t have cultural traditions that connect me to this land. This isn’t the land of my ancestors. Migration often strips cultures down to holidays and recipes because those are portable. You can’t pack a landscape in your suitcase.

But the more I research, the more I understand that both England and the Netherlands had rich relationships with the land. At some point, before the industrial revolution, my ancestors would have been connected to the land out of necessity. They would have grown food and medicines, they may have shepherded sheep or fished the rivers or seas, and they absolutely would have lived tightly knit with the seasons. Even if that thread was lost, I can safely assume it was there somewhere, before.

The more I reflect, the more I start to realize that I’m not grieving the absence of culture. I’m grieving the absence of continuity in my family history - of being able to say “for generations, my ancestors made this meal for this celebration,” or “I come from a long line of [fill in the blank].”

I know little about the ordinary people whose lives made mine possible. I don’t know what songs they sang while they worked. I don’t know what remedies they trusted, or what wildflowers they recognized. I know which countries they came from, but not how they belonged to those places.

That’s what I’ve lost in the migration of my ancestors. I’m thankful to have a place on this land and I wouldn’t dare take it for granted knowing its cost, but sometimes I wish I could sense my own great, great, great grandmother in the land around me.

First, I bought a camera. I’ve been filming all of my Instagram and YouTube content on my 5 year old smartphone, and when my last lapel mic went through the washing machine and died, I had a choice to make: spend money on a new lapel mic or spend 5 times that amount on a proper vlogging camera that comes with its own mic (I got the DJI Osmo 3).

I was so excited to receive that camera in the mail, but as soon as I opened the box, I was overwhelmed. I could barely distinguish the mic from the battery pack, and the instructions were gibberish. But I worked at it. I spent evenings in bed watching videos on how to use it. I practiced. I’m still practicing.

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My latest videos were filmed on the new camera.
Click the image below to go to the playlist:

Second, I tried my hand at making a timelapse video of a mushroom bloom, without a dedicated timelapse camera.

Originally posted on Instagram. Join the conversation there..

My only camera was my phone, which I couldn’t just leave stationed in front of the mushroom kit for weeks on end. I learned to use two new apps to capture the photos and stitch them into a very entry-level timelapse. That little project was so outside of my wheelhouse. I swore at my computer. I almost gave up many times. When I saw the final product, a 2 second clip of off-kilter images, I almost cried.

But, I taught myself some new tools, and if I keep teaching myself new things, one day I’ll create some truly awesome content.

So, I appreciate that the heart of my work still has me out in the garden or working with fresh ingredients in the kitchen. It comes as second nature to me and requires almost no mental focus or fortitude - at least not since I learned to stop fighting nature in the garden.

There’s no getting away from the discomfort of needing to learn things that are outside of our natural wheelhouse. Maybe you’re determined to fix a broken washing machine despite having no mechanical skills. Maybe you’re forcing yourself to sit down and learn to manage your bookkeeping after years of not really paying attention to where your money goes. Or maybe you’re adept behind a computer screen or toolbox and the garden is where you feel out of place. Maybe learning to grow plants is your biggest challenge and you have to force yourself to read, learn, try, fail, and try again.

Whatever you’re struggling to figure out right now, I’m right there with you. Let’s teach ourselves enough new tricks to never go stale. Let’s keep our brains flexible and sharp by challenging them, even when we don’t feel like it. Let’s grow together.

The serviceberries in our front yard are at their peak right now, and the birds know it. I’ve been picking a bowl full here and there this week, but this morning I knew I had to get in there and harvest what I could before the berries were all gobbled up by the local birds. I brought my camera with every intention of creating content.

Instead, I found myself sharing a quiet morning with a spring rabbit and a few robins, all of us foraging in and around this beautiful little tree. I stayed quiet and enjoyed their company. I let myself be present in the moment. I filmed only a handful of (silent) clips.

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The resulting reel will probably never be my best-performing piece of content (it ended up doing pretty well, though!), but it’s one I’ll be able to return to any time I want to be taken back to that moment under one of my favourite trees.

As my audience grows, moments like this feel increasingly important.

A couple of weeks ago my Instagram following rose from 5,000 to over 31,000. A hundred new faces continue to join me every day. I’ve worked for this, hoped for this, but felt silly dreaming for this.

With the larger audience has come increased business opportunities. I have new affiliate partnerships, my first official sponsorship, and more YouTube momentum. It’s exciting and I’m living on cloud nine over here… but growth creates its own pressure.

This year feels like a season of abundance, and I’m tempted to harvest every opportunity. Make another reel, follow another trend, connect with another brand, make another sponsorship deal. The algorithm rewards constant harvesting (of opportunities and ideas, and for me, literally harvesting of food on camera).

I want this business to succeed. These opportunities matter not just because they’re exciting, but because they help make this work sustainable. Every affiliate partnership, sponsorship, and consulting gig makes it a little easier to spend my days doing what I feel called to do.

But, the garden has taught me to appreciate abundance without harvesting it all. Not every foray out the door is about bringing in a harvest or making a click-worthy reel. I have to reserve some of my trips to the garden for tending. In doing so, I’m tending my passion for the garden and for content creation. I’m making room for inspiration to find me.

That’s what I’m trying to hold onto as this little Hobby Homestead business grows: the ability to recognize abundance without feeling obligated to turn every beautiful moment into content.

Picking berries this morning reminded me that the garden grows regardless of whether it’s being filmed. It has no dependencies on my follower count or sponsorship deals. The berries ripen anyway.

My job, as both a gardener and a creator, is not to harvest every opportunity that appears, but to keep tending the conditions that made those opportunities possible in the first place.

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Here’s some of what I’ve been up to as a small business owner these last few weeks:

• Plenty of new YouTube videos, including this one that has surpassed 24,000 views already

• An Instagram reel that has surpassed 309,000 views (and plenty of other Instagram content following that one)

• A couple of new leads for homestead design consultation

• New affiliate partnerships with…

  • Greenstalk (this is the affiliate link for US viewers - get $10 off using my link; Canadian affiliate link coming soon)

  • Plan to Eat (the meal planning app I’ve been using for years; get 20% off your subscription using my link)

  • Mini Mushroom Farm (they don’t offer a discount code, but they have a really great product that I’m finding has ironed out all the usual kinks with indoor mushroom kits)

  • Veradek Planters (I designed a native plant window box using one of their planters and LOVE it. Get 5% off with my code THEHOBBYHOMESTEAD.)

• My first sponsored content (coming soon!)

To all of you reading this, thank you for your support. If you’re new here, I’m so glad you’ve found my work and have chosen to support me. If you’re an old friend, thank you for sticking around through thin and through thick. I’ll be eternally grateful for this life I get to live.

I’ve started sharing frugal recipes at the end of each post, in the hopes that it’ll give my readers some new ideas for how to make good food when the pennies are pinched

Hi, I’m Amy.

I grow food in Ontario, Canada (zone 6a). I’m a gardener, educator, writer, and parent.

If you’ve arrived here from Instagram or YouTube, welcome. I’m glad you’re here.

I've been growing food for as long as I can remember. I learned alongside my parents in our family vegetable garden and helped my grandmother harvest and preserve food for winter. Since then, I've gardened everywhere from apartment balconies to small urban backyards to my current quarter-acre suburban lot.

Today, my family grows and preserves much of our own fruit and vegetables for year-round use. One of my favourite things is showing people just how much abundance can come from a small piece of ground.

I believe gardening isn’t just about producing food. It’s about connection: to the land, to the seasons, to our communities, and to one another.

Stay connected

If this sounds like your kind of gardening, subscribe below.

You’ll receive two articles each month featuring:

• practical gardening topics

• seasonal reflections

• stories from the homestead

• my thoughts on food systems, community, and resilience

directly to your inbox.

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What You’ll Find Here

Practical gardening

• Growing food in cold climates

• Vegetable gardening

• Succession planting.

• Native plants

• Perennial edibles

• Food forests

Community and connection

• Sharing food

• Neighbourhood relationships

• Mutual support

• Building resilience

Living with nature

• Ecological gardening

• Biodiversity

• Working with natural systems

My Gardening Philosophy

I believe gardens should work with nature rather than against it.

That means building healthy soil, welcoming biodiversity, making space for native plants, and accepting that perfection is neither possible nor necessary.

I grow food because it nourishes my family, but also because it connects me to the seasons, my neighbours, and the wider community around me.

I believe abundance is meant to be shared. Some of my favourite moments in the garden happen when food, seeds, plants, knowledge, or stories move from one person to another.

Whether you have a balcony, a suburban backyard, or a larger homestead, my goal is to help you grow more food, deepen your connection to nature, and discover what’s possible where you are.

A Few Places to Start

If you’re new to gardening

Start with Garden Investments with a High Return

If you’re interested in rebuilding community

Read How I Learned to Need People

If you’d like more intermediate/advanced gardening advice

Browse the gardening resources on my website

If you enjoy longer-form content

Visit my YouTube channel for garden tours, tutorials, and seasonal updates

Why I started The Hobby Homestead

I started The Hobby Homestead in 2016 as an Instagram account where I shared my experiences growing food and learning new skills.

Over time it has grown into a community that includes this newsletter, YouTube videos, speaking engagements, consultations, and educational resources.

At its heart, though, the mission remains the same: helping people grow food, build confidence, and strengthen connections with their communities.

Beyond teaching gardening skills, I care deeply about creating spaces rooted in generosity, curiosity, and mutual support. I want to understand where people are coming from, what challenges they face, and how gardening can help them build more resilient and meaningful lives.

A note about inclusion

I have a background in social psychology and bring that perspective into how I think about food systems, communities, and environmental stewardship.

I care deeply about reconciliation, ecological restoration, and creating a more inclusive world. As a settler, I believe we have a responsibility to care for the land and support its healing. That’s one reason you’ll find both food gardening and native plant advocacy woven throughout my work.

The Hobby Homestead is a place where everyone is welcome.

I strive to create a community rooted in kindness, curiosity, generosity, and respect, where people can learn, grow, and connect regardless of their background, experience level, or identity.

I’m glad you’re here.

It can feel countercultural to let my young children wander like this. My instincts, born from my own wildling childhood, tell me to let them wander. My head, informed by sensationalized news headlines and too many true crime documentaries, tells me to not let them out of my sight for even a second. Luckily, like the true 90s child I am, I let them wander (within reason).

I’ve always tended to trust people, but that didn’t always translate into liking people. As a child, I hid under the table at social gatherings (even my own birthday parties). I loathed daycare so much that my parents had no choice but to pull me out of it.

When I look back on my childhood, I recall that I was raised by the farm animals and the wilderness. That’s not true, of course – my family provided me with love, guidance, food, and shelter, but my audacious 10-year-old self was convinced I could have managed without them. I kept a fort in the woods stocked with foraged provisions and imagined myself entirely self-sufficient.

From an early age, I believed I didn’t need anybody.

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Unfortunately, by the time I was a teenager overflowing with rage and angst, those self-sufficient roots made it easy to write people off. I was a young environmentalist, and hated what humanity had done to the planet. I was coming out as gay, and I hated the imprint that homophobes and bigots were leaving on the world.

I started to hate people.

For years, I insisted I only needed one or two close friends. More people meant obligations: birthdays to remember, invitations to accept, responsibilities to carry. I wanted to look after myself and nobody else. Self-sufficiency felt simpler – and it kept me busy.

But that was the problem I wasn’t seeing.

Being self-sufficient, self-reliant, and alone is more work than being part of a functioning community.

It doesn’t feel like it at first. Living in community requires showing up for other people before you’ve experienced the benefits yourself. For a while, it feels like extra work. Then life starts to feel lighter.

Getting to know the members of my neighbourhood wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for my kids, but gardening has been a catalyst for even more connection.

One neighbour asked if I wanted a plum tree she was getting rid of, and I offered to prune her apple trees in exchange. She helped me rip out an invasive shrub to make room for the plum tree and we ended up making a day of it, keeping each other company and making light work of hard jobs.

When I installed the Little Free Garden on my boulevard, more people started to stop and chat with me. This has been the ticket to meeting those without young kids. Some of the passersby have their own gardens and just want to talk about what I have growing. Others ask about what they can harvest and when. Before long, we’re talking about family, work, and about long we’ve lived in the neighbourhood.

My small-talk skills are growing, which may be the most surprising development of all. I now strike up conversations with strangers, like the man waiting in line with me at the Costco propane centre (we talked for 15 minutes about making maple syrup, which, it turned out, was the reason we were both buying propane that day). I’m curious about everyone around me now. What are their interests? What are their skills? What’s their backstory? Do they need help?

What surprised me is that getting to know a handful of neighbours changed how I felt about humanity as a whole. For years, ‘people’ was an abstract category in my mind: consumers, polluters, voters, drivers, commenters on the internet. It was easy to dislike people when they existed mostly as a collective. It’s much harder to dislike people when they’re individuals.

Getting to know people as individuals changed more than my opinion of humanity. The more connected I became to my neighbours, the less life felt like a series of individual transactions and the more it felt like participation in something larger.

When you’re accustomed to doing everything yourself, reciprocity can feel transactional. If I help someone move a pile of woodchips, will they help me when I need something? If I give away extra tomato seedlings, will anyone return the favour?

But that’s not really how community works.

The gifts and favours don’t travel in straight lines. The neighbour who takes your extra seedlings isn’t necessarily the one who lends you training wheels a year later. The person you help plant a tree with might not be the one who brings you soup when you’re sick. The favour rarely returns along the same path it travelled.

After a while, you learn to stop keeping score.

You start to trust that when people have something to give, they’ll give it. And when you need help, someone will show up.

That’s what I saw this weekend as my son wobbled down the street on his new bike. A crowd of kids cheered him on. Parents chatted from driveways and front porches. Popsicles appeared from somewhere.

I’m turning forty next month. When I was younger, I wanted to need as few people as possible. I wanted to grow up to be capable enough that I never had to ask anyone for help.

Now I understand that nobody is actually self-sufficient. The question isn’t whether we’ll need one another. The question is whether we’ll embrace our interdependence and live intentionally and gratefully in community.

For most of my life, I thought the goal was to need people less. I’m learning how much richer life becomes when we need one another well.

I’ve started sharing frugal recipes at the end of each post, in the hopes that it’ll give my readers some new ideas for how to make good food when the pennies are pinched.

Panzanella Salad

Recipe from spendwithpennies.com

I bake all of our bread, and homemade bread goes stale long before store-bought loaves do. We end up with a lot of material for homemade croutons, breadcrumbs, bread pudding, and French toast. This salad is another great way to use up bread that you wouldn’t necessarily want to use for a sandwich anymore. It’s particularly frugal if you have a garden growing cucumbers, tomatoes, onions and herbs.

Ingredients:

• about 5 cups day-old / stale bread, torn into rough chunks

• 3 tablespoons olive oil

• salt & pepper

• 5 or 6 ripe tomatoes

• 1/2 a cucumber

• sliced red onion to taste

• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley and/or basil

Dressing

• 1/4 cup olive oil

• 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar or baslamic vinegar

• 1 teaspoon dijon mustard

• 1 clove garlic, minced

• salt & pepper

But then I try to picture what that actually means for my life.

No remote consulting work. No collaborating with organizations across the country. No shared documents. No video calls. No YouTube channel. No podcast recordings with friends who live in another country. No sending invoices in five minutes from my kitchen table. No researching obscure questions about seed potatoes at 10pm because I suddenly got curious.

A simpler world wasn’t just slower. It was smaller.

If I wanted to do evaluation work twenty-five years ago, I’d probably spend half my life driving. Meetings would happen in person because they had to. Reports would be printed and mailed. Revisions would take weeks instead of hours. Collaboration would happen at the speed of geography. The amount of work I could realistically take on would shrink dramatically.

And honestly, productivity would collapse.

I know there’s a trendy narrative online that modern technology destroyed productivity and attention spans and human connection. Some of that is true. I feel it myself. But there’s another side to it that’s harder to admit: technology also lets me live this life at all.

It lets me cobble together meaningful work from multiple directions. It lets me make gardening videos for people I’ll never meet. It lets me do consulting work for organizations that could never afford to fly someone out every week. It lets me build a weird, patchwork career in a rural place where those opportunities don’t physically exist nearby.

The problem is that convenience slowly becomes infrastructure.

At first, cloud-based work feels freeing. Then one day your internet goes down and you realize you literally cannot do your job. Not badly. Not inefficiently. Completely not at all.

That dependence unsettles me more than the technology itself.

Because every year there’s another layer between me and basic functioning. Another app. Another subscription. Another account. Another password. Another thing that quietly stops working unless everything upstream is functioning perfectly too.

Sometimes I think what I actually miss isn’t the past itself, but resilience.

A world where systems were less efficient, but more understandable. More repairable. More local. A world where a temporary outage was an inconvenience instead of a total shutdown.

And yet, here I am writing this on a laptop, probably to be read on a phone, after spending all morning troubleshooting internet issues so I could upload a gardening video to a global platform.

I don’t really want to abandon technology. I just don’t want my entire life balanced on such a precarious stack of it.

I’ve started sharing frugal recipes at the end of each post, in the hopes that it’ll give my readers some new ideas for how to make good food when the pennies are pinched.

Slow Cooker Butter Chicken

Recipe from Wellplated.com

This recipe makes a DELICIOUS butter chicken - but note that I have absolutely no Indian heritage and probably don’t know what real (non-Canadianized) butter chicken tastes like. This is really good though!!

Ingredients:

• 2 pounds chicken breasts (or 1 can chickpeas)

• 1 tablespoon coconut oil (or other oil)

• 1 tablespoon minced ginger

• 4 cloves minced garlic

• 1 1/2 tablespoons curry powder

• 1 tablespoon garam masala

• 1 1/2 teaspoons chili powder

• 3/4 teaspoons salt

• 1 6oz can tomato paste

• 1 small cauliflower

• 1 14oz can tomato sauce

• 2 tablespoons butter or more coconut oil

• 1/2 cup full fat coconut milk

• 1/2 cup plain Greek yogurt

Serve over rice or homemade naan

I’m extra frugal with this meal by:

• using chickpeas instead of chicken (and I buy bulk dry chickpeas and can them myself)

• growing my own ginger and galic

• buying spices in large containers (it comes down to mere cents for every serving)

• buying tomato paste and puree in bulk from Costco

• omitting the Greek Yogurt (unless I have it on hand already)

Their marketing referred to them as an “expert gardener,” but then I heard them say they started gardening during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Six years ago.

Can someone really be an expert with 6 years of experience under their belt?

It’s hard to believe sometimes that 2020 was only 6 years ago, but it was. That moment sparked a massive cultural shift. Gardening, homesteading, growing your own food, all exploded in popularity. It had me so excited for the state of the world. “Finally!” I thought, “maybe we’re going to relocalize food systems. Maybe more people will understand soil health. Maybe more people will feel connected to the land.”

And in many ways, that did happen. More people are gardening. More people are paying attention.

But alongside that shift, something else emerged: a surge of people selling gardening “expertise.”

Instagram alone is full of gardening consultants, many with a similar origin story: I started gardening during the pandemic.

And I say this with full awareness: I am one of those people selling myself on social media.

So what’s actually bothering me here?

Because on one hand, there are people with advanced degrees in landscape design, landscape architecture, agronomy, agriculture - people who have spent years studying these systems deeply. And yet, without the right mix of social media skills (and let’s be honest, luck), they struggle to compete with self-taught consultants who have built large platforms.

On the other hand, gardening is not neurosurgery.

This isn’t the health and wellness industry, where misinformation can have serious consequences. The stakes are lower. Someone telling you to sprinkle coffee grounds or eggshells on your garden beds isn’t going to cause harm (though, for the record, those materials are far more useful when composted and returned to the soil in a balanced mix of nutrients).

So if it’s not harmful, why does it matter?

That question kept nagging at me, and it led me somewhere unexpected.

What if “expertise” itself isn’t as solid as we think it is?

I spent over a decade in academia chasing that label. I earned an advanced degree because I wanted to be seen as an expert. That credential was supposed to open doors to stable, well-paying work. The kind of work that would justify the time and money spent getting there.

It’s a bit like that Metric lyric: “Buy this car to drive to work, drive to work to pay for this car.”

We invest in education to access jobs, then rely on those jobs to pay for the education. And around and around it goes.

And yet, even after all of that, I never really felt like an expert.

I was an expert in my dissertation topic… for a moment. But knowledge moves quickly. Within a year or two, new research emerges, and the edge of understanding shifts. If you’re not constantly keeping up, your “expertise” starts to age.

The same is true in gardening, horticulture, agriculture… Formal education can give you a strong foundation, but without ongoing learning, whether through research, practice, or observation, you eventually become out of date. I know some horticulture “experts” who are painfully out of date.

So where does that leave us?

Those pandemic-era gardeners, six years in. Could they have something valuable to offer?

Of course they could.

Experience doesn’t only come from formal pathways. Six years of hands-on, attentive gardening, especially if paired with a willingness to learn and maybe a borderline obsession with the topic, can produce real, useful knowledge.

But it does shift something important onto us, as learners and consumers.

If we can’t rely solely on credentials to signal expertise, then we have to engage more critically. We have to listen more carefully. We have to ask better questions. As I say to my kids, perhaps cynically, question everything.

Ask not “are they certified?” but:

• What is their experience, really?

• How do they explain what they know?

• Are they open about uncertainty?

• Do they keep learning?

Because the truth is, there is no level of expertise that guarantees success in the garden.

Nature doesn’t work that way.

Every season is different. Every site is different. Even the most seasoned growers are constantly adapting, learning from new research, from each other, and from the land itself.

Which is why I’ve started to think of gardening not as a field of experts and non-experts, but as a lifelong learning practice.

Some people are further along the path. Some people teach. Some people share. But no one ever really arrives.

And maybe that’s the point.

As promised in last week’s post, here’s another frugal recipe.

Carrot Soup

Recipe from one of my go-to recipe bloggers, Love & Lemons.

This is a family favourite when it comes to soups. It’s better than it sounds.

Ingredients:

• Carrots

• Ginger

• Onion and garlic

• Your favourite cooking oil

• Apple cider vinegar

• Veggie broth

• Salt and pepper

• (optional) Maple syrup and coconut milk

I was extra frugal with this meal by:

• Making my own broth. You can save veggie scraps and/or bones to make broth for free. I can my homemade broth for convenience down the road.

• Using homegrown ginger and garlic. We’re out of homegrown carrots at this time of year, but when we make this soup between July and December, every veggie in this soup is easily home grown. And I mean easily - you can grow all of these veggies in a small garden bed or series of pots.

• You can also grow microgreens very easily with almost no supplies so you can garnish your soup in this adorable way if you’d like. Check out my YouTube video all about growing your own microgreens and sprouts.

Affordability was already a crisis for many long before us middle classers noticed. Justice was already a myth controlled by billionaires long before us white citizens noticed.

But here I am, a white, middle class woman living in a historically stable region (politically and climactically), feeling the strain that we never thought we'd feel.

Luckily for me, I grew up very much low income. We made do with less. We ate a lot of baked potatoes. We grew a garden and raised some animals. For most of my life, those skills seemed almost embarrassing to wear on my sleeve. When I started The Hobby Homestead, I felt abashed about identifying as a “homesteader” irl [in real life].

Now it’s all too popular. Everyone wants to know how to grow food. How to survive with less. I've always wanted to share what I know with the world, and now I feel a fuel to my fire.

As I teach others to grow food, one thing always feels like it's missing from the lessons. How to use the food we grow, and how to cook in frugal ways. In the spirit of sharing ideas and information that could potentially help others to tread water during this time of upheaval and insecurity, I want to start sharing some recipes here.

I am not a food blogger. My photos of the dinner plate are always pathetic in comparison to my photos of the vegetable garden. I don't make up recipes often, and when I do, I certainly don't measure or write them down. But I do cook a lot of meals for my family, and most of those are frugal. I'd like to start sharing some of those frugal meal ideas here. At the end of each Substack newsletter you receive from me, I’ll include a recipe. Here’s one for this week:

Black Bean Burrito - recipe from Allrecipes.com

I was extra frugal with this meal by:

• Using home canned beans (buying dry beans in bulk is cheaper than buying cans)

• Getting tortilla wraps on sale (they freeze well, so buy as much as you can afford when you find them on sale. Even better, you could make your own if you have the time and the flour.)

• Using home grown peppers from the freezer

• Buying cream cheese in bulk

March also usually brings a flurry of work opportunities: from my desk job, consulting for organizations that are approaching their fiscal year end and needing to wrap up projects and spend the last of their funding dollars on a short timeline; to gardening workshops I've been asked to facilitate and the demand for new, timely gardening content as those of us in the north start chomping at the bit to get growing. And of course my own seedlings need to be potted up and the garden beds need topped with fresh compost and the fruit trees need pruning. The work in March is limitless if you're looking for things to do.

March is also, unfortunately, a time of late winter sickness. Every. Damn. Year. There was that year we decided to take our first vacation ever without the kids, to beautiful Wales, in beautiful March, and I spent the whole trip vomiting in every hotel bathroom and laying in the back of the rental car while Kim explored ancient ruins. Last year I had a persistent cough for 6 weeks, sucking my productivity out of the entire month of March. This year it's not as bad, but one of my kids brought a lovely virus home from school the day before March Break began, and we spent the week watching it move through the lot of us.

I've always thought of March as my favourite month because it signaled new beginnings, the return of the sun, and permission to get back out in the garden. But, in reality, it's like the pregnancy before the birth of the child. It's not quite the new beginning yet, just a period of anticipation that seems to stretch on forever. The sun is theoretically stronger, but the rainclouds shade it out (like the hormonally driven emotional rollercoaster that makes it hard to focus on the joy of the pregnancy). The receding snow makes us think we can get started in the garden, but we have annoying physical limitations - the ground is frozen, our muscles are stiff.

I started to write this post in the middle of March, and it took me this long to finish it. Like the month itself, the process stretched on, denying me the satisfaction of completing a task. Of feeling productive. Fittingly, it's nearly April by the time I hit "publish."

Cheers to the end of March, the longest month of the year for the Northern gardener.

We have access to natural sources of fresh water. We have started planning our solar and or wind energy collection to keep the lights on in prolonged blackouts. The members of my immediate family have the skills needed to survive: medical, engineering and construction, living off the land.

So, when I hear that the food security crisis is only set to get worse thanks to unmitigated climate change and corrupt political systems, it is very tempting for me to turn inward. To protect my immediate family from its effects. To stockpile more.

But that cannot be our instinct. It is one thing to improve our resiliency as individuals and family units (by all means, grow food, build skills, keep an emergency kit stocked). But it is another to do it in a way that turns our backs on the rest of the world.

If we react to impending global ‘hard times’ by fearing scarcity, we will feel incapable of sharing with our neighbours. If we ask ‘how can I survive this without losing all of my creature comforts?’ we are no better than the men in power who built the current system of extraction on that very premise.

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We need to think of other life on the planet as our relatives (as I have learned from the teachings of Indigenous Turtle Islanders). If we are holding a defensive line, let it be in defense of all life. If every life is in our family, we must expand our idea of resilience and self sufficiency. One stocked pantry is useless. Global sustainable food systems are the real stocked pantry.

These changes may feel insurmountable when we are distracted by clinging to the comforts we still have, but they are only insurmountable if we remain individualistic. If the hundreds of millions of us in individualistic cultures shifted our thinking to be more collectivist - to serve community over self, to embrace all life as all our relatives, imagine the change we can make.

It starts with one person in one community sharing their extra harvest with a neighbour. Another helping to create a community garden. It starts with each of us making choices to engage in our communities, engage in politics, engage in humanity. We cannot just pull away from the chaos hoping to survive it in isolation, because nothing can survive in isolation.

Know that every extreme prepper will be buried in the rubble eventually, even if they manage to stretch their personal comforts a few years beyond the rest of us. The only way to survive is for all of us to survive. We need to come out of our dugouts, our bunkers, our warm homes with stocked fridges, and we need to fight for sanctity of all life on earth.

If you need me, I’ll be installing some “help yourself” gardens on my suburban boulevard to help feed my community. I don’t have the time or money to do much for the village, but every small gesture has to count.

By late February, in my garden, the sunlight has already started to change. It feels hotter on my face. We’re still bundling up in snowsuits and enjoying winter activities like skiing and sledding, but I can sense that a change is happening. The birds sense it, too. Their mating calls ring out as a dawn chorus, breaking the silence of winter.

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We usually have a thaw in March that melts all the snow, save for a few compacted snowbanks and patches in shady nooks. That thaw triggers me to get moving on garden prep work.

I prepare beds for the first, cold-tolerant seedlings to move outside from their temporary home under grow lights in my house. I cover beds with greenhouse plastic to pre-warm the soil. I haul in new soil or compost to amend the beds. I check irrigation lines. Order materials for additional trellises and garden structures, and add their construction to the to-do list.

I tend to the fruit trees, assessing any winter damage. Pruning. Spraying with oil or lime sulphur. Treating wounds or early signs of disease with a slurry of compost tea, diatomaceous earth, and ashes. If the raspberries haven’t been pruned by the rabbits (ha, they always are), I cut back the old canes and inspect this year’s fruiting canes for signs of disease.

The sap starts running in the maple trees and I rush to collect it before the window closes. The cycle of collecting and boiling keeps me on my toes until the buds swell in early April, signaling the end of maple sugaring season.

Inside, seed starting ramps up. My grow shelves are nearly full already and I’ve only sown half the seeds I have yet to sow.

The gardener’s New Year is an exciting time, but it’s also a busy time. If you’re intentional and careful about the build-up to the growing season, it’s like a warm-up before the marathon. Winter-stiffened muscles start to limber up. soft hands start to callous. Clean fingernails develop their gardener’s manicure - dirt that just won’t wash off, not until November.

To all my fellow gardeners out there, may you have a joyous new year. Ease in to the year of work ahead and remember that it will all come together in due time. Let’s get growing.

If you’d like some garden videos to watch while you wait for the soil to thaw, check out what I’ve been up to the last couple of weeks:

This episode is all about how I decide when to start seeds for my cold climate garden. Our last frost date is mid-May. I talk about deciding if you want giant seedlings under your grow lights for 4 months, using the “days to harvest” information (and where to find it), extending your season to get started outside earlier, and so much more.

If you want visuals to accompany the audio, check out the associated video on YouTube:

It has me thinking about what food I’d miss if I could only eat what grows in my climate.

Coffee, chocolate, California cabernet sauvignon.

Bananas, vanilla, citrus of all kinds.

I often think about the apocalypse, but one where the soil is healthy and I can still grow food. An apocalypse where the earth survives us feels more plausible than one where it doesn’t. And if somehow people still lived, only without our global systems and and capitalist structures, what would we eat?

With the support of a small community, I could grow all the fruits and vegetables we would need to survive. And with my knowledge of food preservation - from canning to root cellars - we’d likely survive the winter, too. I’ve butchered and filled my freezer and pantry with meat chickens before, and I could do it again given enough time to prepare. So although I have no hunting experience (due to lack of opportunity, not lack of interest), we could even have meat and broth in our non-nuclear apocalypse meal plan.

If it were up to my skills alone, though, we wouldn’t thrive. I’ve never grown enough wheat to make bread (nor would I want to). Even with all the dandelion and chicory roots growing in suburban lawns, we’d sorely miss coffee. Unless we hunted, we’d be short the fats needed to fry foods and everything would be roasted on an open fire. Not living near an ocean, we’d quickly miss salt. Wow, would I ever miss salt and fat.

If it weren’t up to my skills alone, could we thrive? I wonder what other skills my community would bring to the table. That’s the more important thought exercise, I think. It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole of ‘what would I do to survive alone in an apocalypse?’ That’s an overly simplistic, individualistic take on the apocalyptic fantasy.

Contemplating how we would rebuild civilization after an apocalypse forces us to stretch our mental muscles even more. What would we value after all else was stripped away? Would we even care about chocolate anymore?

If we somehow met our survival needs in small communities and set about thriving again, would we go about it in the same way our ancestors did? Would we feel that our comfort is worth exploiting other communities? Or would we redefine comfort?

And that’s the rub. The question isn’t whether we could survive on roots, beans, and frost-touched greens. the question is who gets to have coffee, chocolate, and wine while others go without. The global systems that bring these things to our tables are precarious, extractive, and deeply unequal. Wanting these foods isn’t indulgence, but wanting them despite the costs, is.

Thinking about the apocalypse this way strips the fantasy clean: survival isn’t heroic if it means hoarding comfort. Flourishing isn’t moral if it depends on scarcity elsewhere. And if we rebuild, it won’t be enough to grow food or store meat. We’ll have to grow a system that makes these luxuries ethical, shared, and accessible.

Until then, I’ll eat my chocolate, aware that even small comforts carry a weight far beyond my taste buds.

The chickens have started to lay eggs again, which signals lengthening days. They stop laying when the days get shorter around November and, as long as I have some younger, more productive ladies in the flock, start up again around mid-January. As they age, they’ll produce fewer eggs in a year. My 10-year old hens don’t start laying until about May, now, and only lay a few eggs through the summer (they’re retirees).

That brings me to an exciting update about what’s coming next on the homestead: we’re hatching chicks again! I’ve placed a pre-order for hatching eggs, and I expect them to arrive in April. Get ready to be spammed with cute chicks.

On the seed starting front, I’ve only started a few things (luffa, eucalyptus, leeks, ginger), and I’m ALREADY battling fungus gnats. I seem to have found a nematode that works to kill the gnats in my houseplants, so I’ll need to apply some to the seedlings, too. If the nematode product works this year, I’ll be sure to share the brand name.

Online, I’ve been busy creating a lot of new content and uploading it to various platforms. Here’s what’s new:

I completed my first e-book, all about succession planting.

If you’ve followed my gardening content for long, you’ll know that I’m all about cramming a ton of plants into small spaces, defying the limitations printed on the backs of seed packages. I do this and still reap great harvests from the time the snow recedes in spring until the root crops are frozen in the ground in winter. My over-stuffed beds may look haphazard at times, but I promise there is method to my madness.

I lay out these methods in my succession planting e-book, with charts and timing guides for sowing, planting out, and harvesting. It’s designed to help gardeners in Canada’s zone 4–6 (but adaptable anywhere!) plan their season with confidence, avoid wasted space, and keep the harvest rolling.

Here’s a sneak peek of what’s inside:

• Step-by-step schedules for cool and warm-season crops

• Easy-to-read month-by-month planting charts

• Tips for quick crops, slow crops, and continuous harvests

If you’ve ever wished for a strategy to make the most of a small garden space and never run out of fresh veggies, this e-book is for you.

You can grab it here: Succession Planting eBook

I also started a podcast! Very unofficially, very low-tech. It’s all about my favourite edible perennials, and is chock full of my tips and strategies for growing each of them. For now, I’m using the podcast platform to create a second home for my long, deep-dive YouTube videos. Sometimes you may not have 45 minutes to watch a video, but you could have the audio playing while you drive or clean the house. For those “talking head” style videos, as they’re unfortunately called, I’ll have audio versions available here to listen at your leisure.

And I recorded it right here in Substack:

This podcast episode is a refined, audio version of last week’s Edible Perennial YouTube video, so if you’d rather see visuals, you can check that out here:

Check Out This Week's YouTube Video

Thank you for supporting my work and for trusting me enough to steer you right in the garden. There’s only a little bit of winter hibernation time left before the heavy lifting of early spring begins, so tuck in and get rest while you can. The garden season is coming…

I love annual vegetables—but if I’m honest, the plants that feed us most reliably, with the least effort on my part, are perennials. They’re the ones that show up year after year, even when life is busy, even when I’m tired, even when the weather is weird.

In this episode, I share my top ten favourite edible perennials—the plants that have truly earned their place in my garden. These aren’t novelty crops or high-maintenance showpieces. They’re adapted, resilient, and mostly take care of themselves. Many are native, some are cultivated, and all of them play the long game.

You’ll hear me talk about:

• Low-effort perennial foods that thrive in real, imperfect gardens

• Berries, herbs, tubers, and fruit trees that reward patience over productivity

• What perennial food systems can teach us about resilience, trust, and time

This episode is adapted from one of my longer YouTube videos, but reworked specifically for audio—meant to be listened to while you’re walking, gardening, or just thinking.

If you’re interested in growing food in a way that works with nature instead of against it, you’re in the right place.

Jerusalem Artichoke recipe I love (based on recipe from the cookbook, Plenty)

It’s a meal that my dad introduced me to as a child, and I have fond memories of sharing this “special” dish with him. Special because I knew most people around us were revolted by the look of it. The fact that I, a small child, gobbled them up and asked for more, made me special.

It’s not just the nostalgia that keeps me coming back for more, though. I love the taste of chicken hearts fried in a cast iron pan and drizzled with maple syrup. I love beef liver with caramelized onions. I appreciate the added collagen that chicken feet lend to a broth. I rejoice when friends give me their freezer-burnt turkey carcasses to turn into rich broth, and I greedily suck the marrow from big beef bones.

Why am I talking about organ meat, chicken feet, and bones?

I believe that to eat meat with a clean conscience in this day and age, we have to be keenly aware of what we’re eating and how it came to be on our plates. There are no more excuses. Information is at our fingertips. A “real food” movement has been underway for decades. This knowledge feels less like something new and more like something circling back - toward Indigenous ways of relating to animals as relatives, teachers, and gifts, rather than commodities. Humanity did not start out disconnected in this way; we were set back by forces like religion, industrialization, and convenience. Now we are finding our way back.

I actually feel energized when I hear children refer to all meat as “chicken,” or to have no idea that pork is pig or beef is cow or that the stuff inside of Chicken McNuggets was once a living animal. There is so much to teach! Rally the troops - let’s get into the schools and add to the Health curriculum and teach kids what food really is and where it comes from.

I suffer no ethical dilemma around eating meat. I only suffer empathetically when meat is consumed without due respect for all life that is impacted by its consumption.

For me, respect starts with using the whole animal.

An animal gave its life so that I could be nourished. Treating that gift as interchangeable, disposable, or cheap feels like a moral failure. Eating hearts, simmering bones, saving feet for broth, learning how to cook liver - these are acts of refusal. A refusal to let death be meaningless. A refusal to let convenience be the only value guiding my food choices.

Whole‑animal eating forces attentiveness. It slows you down. It asks you to learn skills many of us were never taught (or were taught to avoid). It also makes abundance visible: how much nourishment exists beyond the familiar cuts shrink‑wrapped in plastic. When we only eat the parts that look safe, we create waste first in our minds, and then in our systems.

But respect doesn’t stop in the kitchen.

It also matters how an animal lived. Grazing animals have a place in healthy ecosystems. When managed well, they build soil, cycle nutrients, sequester carbon, and convert grass into deeply nourishing food. A cow on pasture is not the same thing as a cow in a feedlot.

And this is where things get uncomfortable.

Eating meat “well” in this way often requires privilege. It takes money to buy grass‑fed meat from local farms. It takes time to source it, to cook unfamiliar cuts, to simmer bones overnight, to fail a few times before getting it right. It takes access to farmers, to freezers, to kitchens, to knowledge that was once common and is now niche.

I don’t want to pretend otherwise. And I don’t want to pretend I do this perfectly.

Sometimes I buy meat from a farmer I trust. Sometimes I buy meat from Costco because I need my grocery dollars to stretch. It’s not about purity, to me, it’s about intention. I eat less meat than I used to. I try to waste none of it. I pay attention. I let the discomfort inform my choices without turning it into shame, for myself or anyone else.

Because judgment doesn’t build better food systems, honesty does.

We are all making decisions within constraints: financial, cultural, geographic, generational. Not everyone can opt out of industrial food. Not everyone has the capacity to relearn lost skills. But we can stay awake. We can pay attention. We can let our meals remind us that life begets life, that nourishment carries responsibility, and that even small acts of care like using the bones, eating less, and asking where this came from, can stitch us back into relationship with the animals we consume.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the content I’ll create this year. My social media feed is already inundated with “What Seeds to Sow in January” and “Top Mistakes When Planning Your 2026 Garden!”

I don’t want to re-create. I had this conversation with Kim (my wife) over the “holidays.” I complained that I was bored with my social media feed - instead of beautiful pictures of gardens and discussions about ecology, it was the same cookie-cutter content. Reels with a meaningless loop clip with the text overlay: “It’s very important that you…” or “Almost forgot that this was the whole point.” I scoffed. Kim said that if I want to improve my reach and successfully market my business on social media, I’d have to jump on that bandwagon. But I can’t make myself.

What draws me to being a “content creator” is the creative freedom. The ability to share my life with the world. So, I may stay small, but I promise to stay authentic. My content over on YouTube and Instagram will continue to be vlog-style educational. My content on Substack will continue to be personal updates in the gardening and homesteading niche, with a political slant.

I don’t begrudge anyone who plays the game. We all have bills to pay, mouths to feed, and dreams we’re trying to keep alive. But I’m realizing that I can’t outsource my creativity to an algorithm and still recognize myself in the work. My channels might grow slowly. My content may never go viral. But it will be rooted in my actual life, my values, and the long view — the same way I garden, the same way I try to live.

First, our 4-year-old son has had some mystery health problems that came to a climax the first week of December. Kim spent a long night with him in the emergency room, multiple tests were run, and we still have no answers. He has missed half of the past month of school.

I had an intense work deadline that fell over 10 horrible days. During this intense work period, I was caring for my sick kid, threw my back out to the point of not being able to move for 8 hours (requiring prescription drugs to tolerate the pain), and promptly got the flu 2 days into my healing. That work report was written late into the evenings and under the influence of pain, medication, and sleep deprivation.

Now over two weeks into December, none of us are healthy yet. I haven’t been able to produce any content for The Hobby Homestead (but, I’m thanking my past self for pre-recording two videos knowing I had this other work deadline on my plate). I haven’t baked a single Christmas cookie. My emails are piling up and I haven’t pursued any leads for work in the new year. I wish I could just quit and start fresh in January.

But, I’m an entrepreneur now. The pressure to keep going is intense. It takes actually drowning to make me stop and remember what really matters.

There comes a point in every burnout where you simply cannot function anymore. You turn the key and all you get is sputtering and foul fumes. As an entrepreneur or a homesteader, this can feel terrifying. Who will get the deliverable finished by the deadline and avoid losing this client or this paycheck? Who will trudge through the snow to take care of the animals? Who will cook the meals and bake the bread?

But when you truly cannot summon the time or the energy to do these bare minimums of tasks, when you’re flat out in bed not even able to care for yourself, life is stripped down to the things that really matter.

I spent days in bed, and my kids joined me. We watched hours of Bluey, and for once, I actually watched the show with them. I cuddled with them more in the last 2 weeks than I had all Fall. Kim and my mom pulled together and made sure the kids got their annual gingerbread decorating day. They used kits from the bulk barn instead of home-baked gingerbread, and nobody cared. We ordered take-out two nights in a row.

Not only did I let my high standards go, I stopped caring about them completely.

The world didn’t end. My worth didn’t evaporate. This is something homesteading culture and entrepreneurship culture both struggle to admit. We romanticize resilience. We celebrate grit. But resilience isn’t never falling down - it’s knowing when to stay down long enough to heal.

When it rains, it pours. Sometimes we flail. Sometimes we swallow water. Sometimes we go under. And that’s okay as long as we remember that drowning, metaphorically, is often the body’s last-ditch effort to force us to float

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As a homesteader, my values have drifted far from the commercialized version of Christmas. I’m a fan of crafting, slow living, and intention. Commercial Christmas, on the other hand, is all about new gadgets, rushed mall trips, and one-click same-day delivery.

Despite my distaste for that version of the holiday season, I still live in this society and I still have young children whose hearts swell at the sight of magical gifts under the tree. I’m not interested in being the grinch who steals everyone else’s joy, so I participate. I just try to participate in a way that aligns with my values.

Enter: the slow-made gift pantry.

Without meaning to, I’ve been building a pantry of giftable, homemade or homegrown items. At some point in your homesteading journey, you hit that sweet spot of abundance - where you have more of something than you could possibly use all by yourself.

As a gardener, you might begin with a meagre harvest that barely makes a meal or two… and one day find yourself hauling in baskets big enough to share with all your neighbours.

When you pick up a new craft (knitting, woodworking, soap making), your early attempts might feel too imperfect to share. But eventually you’ll look around and realize you’ve amassed a small mountain of hats, scarves, wooden spoons, upcycled jewelry—whatever your craft produces. Enough to stock an Etsy shop… or simply gift.

I’m not much of a crafter these days - life with young kids keeps my hands full. But I always have preserves and seeds to share. Often I have an abundance of other homegrown goods, too, like dried luffa sponges and eucalyptus shower bundles.

Here is a list of home-grown or homemade gift ideas to inspire your own slow-made gift pantry, built from the byproducts of your everyday life.

Food

Preserves: Jams, jellies, pickles, and syrups. You don’t need to have grown every ingredient; it’s the intention and labour of canning that makes this a special gift.

Herbed salts or homemade spice blends: If you grow herbs, or even if you just have a few favourite in your cupboard, you can create custom blends like “pizza herbs,” “chili night mix,” or lemon-herb finishing salt. Drying herbs is easy in a dehydrator, low oven, or just in the open air. Blends can look beautiful in small, thrifted jars, and they’re useful for almost anyone who cooks.

Bread and baked goods: If you’re a sourdough baker, make a few extra loaves on a weekend and deliver them fresh. If you’re feeling fancy, whip up some compound butter and package everything in a thrifted basket. A platter of homemade cookies is a classic consumable gift. I bake double (or quadruple) batches and freeze extras so one baking session stretches far.

Gardening

Seeds: Home-saved seeds, or even extra seeds you bought that you won’t use, make a great gift for the fellow gardener in your life. I usually do a quick germination test before gifting. If you’re new to seed saving, read up on each plant species’ quirks. Easy seeds for beginners to save include pole beans and peas (let some pods dry on the plants), lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, and flowers like zinnias and calendula. Native flowers are trending right now in the gardening world, and many native plants have easy-to-save seeds, too.

DIY Sprouts kits: You can make sprouting kits with things most homesteaders have on hand - canning jars, cheese cloth, and seeds. I recommend buying seeds specifically sold for sprouting, since they’re cleaned for safe raw consumption. Buy in bulk (from a place like West Coast Seeds1), divide into jars, and print simple instructions plus a few meal ideas.

Plant Starts or Divisions: If you grow perennials or easy-to-propagate houseplants, you can gift healthy divisions or rooted cuttings in small, thrifted pots. Chives, mint, oregano, and berry canes all divide beautifully. If you live in a cold climate, just make sure you pot up any outdoor plants before the ground freezes and keep them in an unheated garage or outside until gifting.

Home

Fire starters: Perfect for people with a wood stove or who camp often. We’ve made really effective ones using old candles, sawdust from under the table saw, and toilet paper tubes. It’s an easy, batchable project - you can make dozens in one go.

Foraged or homegrown evergreen arrangements or wreaths: These work best when gifted a little before Christmas so they can be enjoyed during the season. I’ll admit: receiving a holiday decoration on Christmas Day can feel anticlimactic when I’m already plotting to take everything down to recover from the sensory overload.

Soaps, lotions, and candles: Whether made from scratch or from kits, these are classic, useful gifts. And they scale beautifully - one crafting session usually yields many individual items to share.

Slow-made gifts are beautiful because they carry the story of our year. The jars you filled in August, the seeds you saved in September, the wool you knitted in front of a fire. This is how I can feel good about participating in the season of gift giving without contributing to over-consumption, waste, and lining the pockets of billionaires.

You don’t need a perfect homestead or endless free time. Just start noticing what your life naturally produces in surplus. That’s your gift pantry.

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