Ways to Homestead in the Suburbs

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A lot of people associate homesteading with having a large property with acres of land, a huge garden, and several different livestock animals. And there are many homesteaders who fit that description. But if you view homesteading as more of a lifestyle and a mindset rather than a specific size of property, there are many ways to homestead in the suburbs, too, or even in a more urban setting.

Some aspects of homesteading might be easier out in the country, but there there are many ways to live a homesteading lifestyle even if you live in a suburban or urban setting. If you think of homesteading as a way of living more simply by having more of a connection to where your food comes from and of producing things on your own, then there are many ways that you can do that even if you don’t have acres and acres of land.

I’ve listed out twenty ideas that came to my mind for ways to homestead in the suburbs. This list isn’t exhaustive, of course, and I’m sure there are other ideas that I’m not thinking of. But these are ones that I thought of that would be doable in most suburban settings. The amount of space that you have and the local regulations where you live will be a factor in what sort of homesteading activities you can do, especially when it comes to livestock animals and sometimes even with gardening, depending on where you live. But overall there are still plenty of options for living the homesteading lifestyle wherever you live.

20 Ways to Homestead in the Suburbs

1) Cook from Scratch

Cooking from scratch is something that is doable no matter how much land you have. Even if you don’t have enough land to grow much of your own food (or even any of your own food), you can still cook from scratch using good quality ingredients from a local farm or farmer’s market or a grocery store. By cooking your own food you can save a lot of money compared to eating meals out and you also have a lot more control over the quality of your food because you know exactly what ingredients you are using and where you sourced them from.

2) Maintain a Sourdough Starter

Maintaining a sourdough starter is another thing that you can do even if you don’t have any land. All you need is flour, water, some cheesecloth, and a jar and you can have your own sourdough starter for making sourdough bread and any other sourdough recipes you want to try.

3) Grow Vegetables

Growing vegetables is one of the classic things we tend to think of when we think of homesteading, and it’s something that usually pretty doable in a suburban setting. There might be some exceptions, especially if you live in an HOA or if your town has any rules about where gardens can be located. I’ve heard that some towns don’t allow front yard gardens, for example, so it might be a good idea to make sure that you’re allowed to have a garden where you live. But if you’re able to have a garden then you can grow a decent amount of vegetables even if you don’t have acres and acres of land.

The size of your garden and the amount of food you can grow will depend on the size of your property as well as how much sunlight you get, but there are lots of ways that you can be creative to grow more vegetables. You can use pots and containers on patios, you can use raised beds or in-ground gardens, depending on which would work better for your yard and situation. And you can use trellises and poles for support to grow vegetables such as beans, peas, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, etc. vertically so you can grow more in less space.

4) Grow Herbs

Herbs are a great addition to a suburban homestead because they are usually pretty easy to grow and many of them are perennials, too, so you can enjoy a harvest from them year after year. Fresh herbs are pretty pricey if you buy them in little packets at a grocery store, so if you like to use fresh herbs you can save quite a bit of money by growing your own at home. And since many herbs are quite pretty when they are flowering they blend in well with other ornamental plantings, too.

5) Grow Fruit Bushes, Etc.

There are plenty of small fruits that you could easily grow in a suburban yard. Strawberries could fit into landscaping nicely or even be grown in containers, and berry bushes for blueberries, raspberries, etc. don’t take up too much space either. You might even be able to fit a small grape arbor in your yard or have grapes climb up trellises or an archway, etc.

6) Plant a Mini Orchard for Fruit Trees

The size of your yard will make a difference in whether or not you are able to have a mini orchard, but most suburban yards could easily fit a few dwarf or semi dwarf fruit trees. Standard sized fruit trees will get very large, so they might not be as practical, but fruit trees that have been grafted onto root stock that won’t grow very tall could fit nicely into the landscaping of a suburban yard. Instead of growing ornamental flowering trees you could grow fruit trees instead that will still have pretty flowers in the spring but will also produce fruit for you during the summer and/or fall.

7) Create Your Own Compost

Rather than buying expensive bags of compost at the store to use for your garden, you can create a compost pile to make your own at home. By using things like kitchen scraps, grass clippings, leaves, etc. you can make your own compost for free using things that would have either gone in the trash or been put by the side of the road for collection. You can use an all vegetable compost with kitchen scraps and yard waste, or, if you have chickens or other small homesteading animals, you can also compost their manure, too. By making your own compost at home you can improve your soil without having to spend a lot of money while also reducing waste at the same time.

8) Raise Chickens or Ducks for Eggs

Raising chickens of ducks for eggs is very doable for a lot of suburban settings. You would have to check with your town’s permit regulations, but many suburban towns allow people to have small animals like chickens. Some suburban towns don’t have any rules at all about keeping chickens or ducks, some towns allow limited numbers of them with regulations about how far away the coop has to be from property lines, etc. And some towns don’t allow chickens or ducks at all, so it really all depends on where you live.

If you are allowed to have chickens or ducks where you live, though, then they are a great beginner livestock animals that fit in well with a suburban setting. I’ve never raised ducks myself, but I’ve had chickens for a couple of years now and have really enjoyed it. There are some pros and cons to having backyard chickens in the suburbs, but overall the pros outweigh the cons in my opinion. Chickens don’t need nearly as much space as other livestock animals like pigs or cows, so they can fit well in many suburban back yards. They can make great pets, too, and the eggs are the freshest you can get!

9)Raise Animals for Meat

Depending on the size of your property and any permit regulations you might have in your town, this may or may not be a doable option for you. You don’t need all that much land to raise animals like chickens or ducks for meat, so it’s possible that a suburban back yard could be large enough to raise a decent amount of meat chickens or ducks. If you have a very small yard then you might not have enough room, especially if you want to be able to raise them on grass or use a chicken tractor-type system to move them to different parts of your yard. And if your town has a low permit limit for the number of birds that you can have then that would definitely be a factor to consider because if you’re allowed to have only a few chickens or ducks then you might want to just keep them as egg layers and pets rather than raising them as meat birds.

10) Raise Goats for Milk

This is something that I’ve never tried before, and I’ve heard that goats aren’t usually considered a beginner homesteading animal, but if you already have some experience working with animals (or if you’re ready for an adventure) then goats are a smaller animal that you could add to your suburban homestead to have a source of milk without needing all of the space for a dairy cow. You would have to check with your local regulations, of course, to see if goats are an animal that is allowed on your property, and it would take a lot of research and planning, but, because they don’t take up nearly as much space as a cow would, goats could be a good solution for a small suburban homestead for those looking to add a source of dairy to their property.

11) Keep Bees for Honey

Keeping bees is another thing I haven’t tried, but if you had the right equipment and put in the effort to learn about beekeeping it seems like something that would be very doable for a suburban yard since beehives don’t take up too much space. You would need to check the local regulations where you live to see if beekeeping is allowed or if there are any permits that you would need to get, etc. but keeping bees could be a great way to have a source of honey in your backyard and also help with pollinating your flowers and garden, too.

12) Tap Maple Trees To Make Maple Syrup

Tapping maple trees for syrup is something I tried doing a couple of times. It was really fun to collect the sap and see it turn into syrup. It’s something I haven’t done the past few years, but it’s something I might do again at some point. Since I only had a couple of maple trees that were big enough to tap I found it hard getting enough sap at one time to make it worth the time of collecting it and boiling it down into syrup. If you live in a yard where you have several large maple trees, though, and if you want to save money on pure maple syrup then it could be worth your time to tap your trees and make your own syrup.

13) Make Your Own Soap

Soap making is something I haven’t tried yet, but there are lots of recipes that you can find for making all kinds of different soaps. I’m sure there’s probably a learning curve at first to get used to the process, and you have to buy the initial supplies and equipment you need, but once you already have the supplies I think that making your own soap at home would probably save money over buying soap at the store (at least for the more natural soaps with quality ingredients.) And it would be nice to be able to customize your soaps exactly the way you want them to be and to have control of all of the ingredients that are in the soap, too.

14) Make Your Own DIY Beauty Products

While some beauty products might be harder to create at home than others, there are lots of different recipes online that you can find for natural, homemade skin care and hair care, and even some DIY makeup options, too. You can make homemade salves, creams, and body butters using simple, natural ingredients. You can also make hair rinses and oil treatments, and things like homemade lip balm and perfume, too. There are lots of different options.

15) Make Your Own DIY Cleaning Products

Just like with DIY beauty and personal care recipes, there are lots of different ways to use common household items such as vinegar and baking soda to clean your home naturally and to make some of your own cleaning products using simple and natural ingredients.

16) Learn Herbalism and Make Herbal Preparations

Another way that you can live with a homesteading mindset even on a small property is to learn more about herbs and how to use them. You can do some research about different herbs to learn how to identify them (for ones growing wild near where you live). You can learn about the different properties that the herbs have, different parts of the body that the herbs can help support, as well as any cautions or contraindications about a particular herb. And once you have some knowledge about herbs in general, you can learn how to make different preparations and start making some of your own herbal tea blends, salves, tinctures, etc. And even if you don’t have enough space to grow many herbs yourself, you can buy good quality herbs in bulk and learn about ways to use them to support your health.

17) Forage For Herbs in Your Yard

Most suburban backyards have several different types of herbs growing wild that you can harvest. The varieties will vary depending on where you live, of course, but a few of the ones that I’ve found in Massachusetts include: dandelion, plantain, violet, mullein, goldenrod, and St. John’s Wort. You would want to make sure that you forage for herbs in a clean part of your yard that hasn’t been sprayed with any chemicals and that you do plenty of research to make sure that you are correctly identifying any herbs you harvest (especially if they are ones that have any poisonous lookalikes), and you also want to make sure that it’s an herb that is safe for you to use. It’s important to make sure that there aren’t any contraindications with any health conditions you might have or any medications you are taking. And many herbs are contraindicated for pregnancy and nursing, too.

With those cautions in mind, though, it’s possible to harvest quite a good amount of herbs for free right in your backyard. I’m really enjoying the abundance of violet leaves and plantain leaves that I’ve been able to harvest so far, and I love the fact that I didn’t even have to do any work to plant them.

18) Forage For Edible Plants in Your Yard

In addition to herbs that you can harvest to use for herbal preparations such as teas, tinctures, salves, etc. you can also often find edible plants growing wild in a suburban yard. In my yard, for example, there is a wild mulberry bush that produces berries every summer. Some of the herbs such as dandelion or violet leaves can also be eaten as salad greens in the early spring time (do you research first, of course!)

19) Dehydrate Foods Your Grow or Purchase from Local Farms

Dehydrating food can be a great old-fashioned method of preserving food whether you do it with vegetables, fruits, and herbs you grew in your own garden or whether you do it with produce you bought at a local farm or farmer’s market. You can take advantage of the bounty in your garden or of bulk buys from farms and preserve that food for later by dehydrating things in your oven or with a dehydrator.

20) Can Foods You Grow or Purchase from Local Farms

If your garden is producing an abundance of a certain vegetable or fruit you can take advantage of the surplus by canning some of it to save for later. This is something I haven’t done yet because I’ve mostly been using either dehydrating or freezing as methods of food preservation, but canning is a good option because it gives you shelf stable foods that are ready to eat and you don’t have to worry about them spoiling if you lose electricity for awhile.

And even if you don’t have a garden, if you have canning equipment and plenty of jars you can still preserve a lot of food that you buy from a local farm. You can often find bulk deals for seconds or “Grade B” produce that doesn’t look quite as nice but is still fine to eat that would work perfectly for things like homemade jams and jellies, salsa, tomato sauce, etc. And by making these things yourself at home you can know exactly what ingredients are in the food you are eating and probably save some money, too!

What other ways of homesteading in the suburbs did I forget about? Let us know your ideas in the comments!

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The information in this post is not to be taken as medical advice and is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease.