21 Inspiring Ideas To Get Started With Apartment Homesteading
Are you stuck living in an apartment? Do you yearn for the homesteading lifestyle? Stop dreaming and waiting: apply these apartment homesteading ideas now.
Have the dream of owning your own few acres of land where you can grow all your food? Preserving everything to feed your family all year? Making a living off your homestead without dependence on an office job?
But right now you’re stuck in an apartment or condominium or townhouse with a tiny postage-stamp sized lot. Those dreams of a self-sufficient homestead seem so distant and unreachable.
However not all is lost. You CAN actually find ways to live an apartment homesteading lifestyle in the middle of a city.
Here are 21 ideas to get you started.
Note: Make sure anything you do in your apartment or balcony does not violate any rules your landlord or strata has in place. Check first to avoid being evicted or fined.
Have An Apartment Homesteading Mindset
In general you need to start having a homesteading mindset even before you can have your own homestead. All of the other 20 ideas are great to have, but if you don’t set yourself up to try them and make an attempt, you’ll never get anywhere and it doesn’t bode well for when you one day have your dream homestead.
Homesteading requires you to set goals and have a desire to achieve your end results, despite setbacks and failures. You also need to let go of perfection as nature has it’s own way and you really can’t control it 100%.
Grow A Salad Container Garden
This is as simple as it gets to grow your own food at home. Save money on the expensive take-out salads at work or school and grow your own!
- Find yourself a nice container that is about 12-14 inches (30-35cm) wide at the top. And a good 12-16 inches deep (30-40cm).
- Fill it with a lightweight potting soil.
- Plant a tomato transplant in the middle. Best is to stick with a cherry tomato.
- Surround the tomato with three lettuce transplants evenly spaced around it.
- (Optional) Add in one to two basil plants (you can even buy these at the grocery store) between the lettuce.
- Water well and place it in a sunny location on your balcony or patio.
- Every week or so give the pot some diluted seaweed fertilizer.
- Pick the tomatoes, lettuce and basil to make a fresh salad!
Check out this video on how to make one:
Grow Your Own Strawberries
As I wrote in my case study of Balcony Barbara, start small if you want to start growing your own food.
Strawberries at the grocery store are expensive and usually tasteless. Plus they have travelled many miles to get to the grocery store.
Growing a small container of 4 or 5 strawberry plants will give you enough strawberries to put on cereal in the morning or on ice cream in the evening for dessert.
You do need some sunlight although you can also grow them hydroponically under grow lights if you don’t have a sunny balcony or patio.