Hey, so we are in the middle of our season talking about unconventional homesteading and one of the topics that has been most requested not just for this season, but I've had questions about this for a very long time is how to homestead when you're single.

You know, if you don't have a spouse, can you homestead is it possible? How do you get around those obstacles? And so I knew I wanted to find just the right person to talk about this with us today and I have her. She's on. So I'd like to welcome Sherry to the podcast. She not only is homesteading on her own. She's also homesteading in that kind of golden year age period that we talked about with another guest, but Sherry can bring a whole different perspective to that. So this is going to be an awesome conversation. Welcome Sherry.

Thank you. Thanks. Bye to the year.

So kick us off just with a little bit of your backstory. Is homesteading something that you've always done or was this something that you came to later in life?

I'm not always done it. I started back when my kids were real little. We lived in the city and I had a garden in the backyard and wanted chickens. Finally, we got chickens, but we had to keep the oysters in the house.

Still a city back in 2000. We got our first homestead. Okay. And the kids were still with us at that time. So it was five children myself and my husband. And we moved into the country.

Okay, awesome. And what were your roles like at that point? Were you kind of all sharing the load equally?

Pretty much. My husband still had the work full time. Kids were young enough that they could help, you know, with the chickens, milking the goats, tending the garden with a huge garden back in those days.

And I basically just was the mom.

You know, I helped with everything, but my husband was a carpenter so he could build. We took care of the barns. You know, that sort of thing.

Awesome. And so when did that shift? When did you shift into home sitting on your own versus the way you were doing it in the previous years?

In 2012.

We had been doing it for 12 years. And the kids were all getting older. A couple of more off to college and one had a zone or actually two or three at the wrong place at that point.

But my husband passed away.

It wasn't sudden, but it was still not expected.

We had to describe that. It's just we had hopes that this that was not going to happen, but it did. So that's when things really changed.

The kids that had moved away came back home to help take care of him for months, months, because we did alternative treatments for him.

So I needed help. They did help. And then once he passed away, they moved back out again slowly.

So it wasn't such a shock for me. But at that point, I was on my own.

Did you ever have a moment after he passed that you were kind of like, I'm not sure if I want to continue home setting, like, or did you always know that this was the path that you were going to continue on?

I just knew that I wanted to continue. I just didn't know how I was going to.

I had lost my husband his income. And on top of all of that, I lost the house. I lost the land.

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