Homesteading Is More Than Growing Food: Building a Self-Sufficient Lifestyle

When people think of homesteading, they often picture a big vegetable garden, jars of preserves, and maybe a few backyard chickens. While food production is part of it, real homesteading is so much more. It’s also about developing practical skills, adopting a mindset of creativity and problem-solving, running a business for income, and, perhaps most surprisingly, it’s about community.

In this article, we’ll explore how these four elements — skills, mindset, business, and community — weave together to create a truly self-sufficient lifestyle. Whether you’re starting with a balcony garden or managing a small farm, you’ll discover how to grow your homestead into something deeper than food alone.

What Is Homesteading Really About?

Homesteading is a lifestyle of self-sufficiency that goes beyond growing your own food. Once you have your vegetable garden and orchard running, lots of vegetables and fruits are produced, usually more than you can eat. So preserving what you can’t eat is a natural way to go.

Our Vegetable Garden in Monchique — Our vegetable garden in the spring of 2025. Onions, garlic , carrots and beetroots growing in front. The first tomatoes planted in the back.

At a certain point, your money savings for building up your homestead will be gone, so the next question will be: “How are we going to survive financially”? At the same time, you want to increase your resilience and self-sufficiency and do as much as possible yourself. Soon you discover that you will need to increase your skills and train your mindset for being flexible. Keeping all these balls in the air can become an act of juggling.

On our homestead, we first started to build our house, so we had a place to live. That was before we moved in. We didn’t bring a lot of money along, so the question of how to survive financially came up very quickly. So we set up a safari tent to rent out to holiday guests.

The Safaritent we used to have on Monchique Homestead — The safari tent that we used to have. Now we have a straw-bale house on the same place.

The next step was to start up our vegetable garden so we would be more self-sufficient food-wise. Over the years, it all evolved into what it is now: a small–scale dairy producing homestead with chickens, an orchard, and a big vegetable garden.

Running our place is sometimes an act of juggling balls. It truly needs a homestead mindset and the will of persistence. But it also brings a lot: eating your own produced food year–round, the joy of the perfect taste of a homemade cheese, walking through the beautiful mountains with our goats. It’s all part of the game.

Our goat Susu in the mountains Our goat Susu on the goat’s land.

Beyond the Garden: Skills Every Homesteader Needs

Growing your own food is the first step into homesteading for most people, but the lifestyle really develops when you begin learning a wider range of self-sufficiency skills. Here are some of the most valuable areas to grow into:

Food preservation

A bumper harvest is wonderful, but unless you can store it, much of it goes to waste. That’s where food preservation comes in. Canning, pickling, and dehydrating are the most used ways of preserving food to keep something to eat on hand throughout the year. Preserved foods also bring variety to the winter table — think jars of tomato sauce, pickled jalapeños, or dried herbs from your summer garden. These skills help stretch your harvest into every season.

Tom with a prepared tray of tomatoes for the dehydrator. — Tom with a tray of tomatoes prepared for the dehydrator.

Some of these methods are more time–consuming than others. When we have little time, we dehydrate vegetables like aubergines and courgettes. A good side effect is also that it reduces the volume of the vegetable, so you need less space for storage.

Find out More about Dehydrating

We also do a lot of canning. Sometimes combining different vegetables in a can or just using one type of vegetable with a bit of salt. Pickling is also a type of canning but with vinegar; there are many great recipes on the internet, and once you have tried some and get the hang of it, you can make your own combinations. If you like sweet, sour, and spicy, making chutneys is also a wonderful option.

Find out More about Canning

Livestock care & production

Animals add both responsibility and resilience to a homestead. Chickens provide eggs, goats or cows bring milk, and bees supply honey and pollination. Each adds diversity to your food supply and creates extra income opportunities if you sell surplus. Caring for animals also deepens your connection to the land, as you learn to balance their needs with what the homestead can provide.

Chicken at Monchique Homestead — Our laying hens.

Chickens

Chickens are the easiest animals for the homestead. They don’t need huge amounts of food, and eggs are a very nice source of protein. A few chickens can provide you with enough eggs for all the protein that you need. Their dwellings do not need to be big either, although they need protection from bad weather. They do not need lots of care: enough food, clean water, clean dwellings and laying boxes to drop their eggs—that’s about it. Other than taking care of them, there are not so many extra things you need to know or skills that you need to learn.

Chickens can be used for clearing small herbs and weeds and be integrated into vegetable gardening. They can also be used in an orchard to eliminate orchard pests like Mediterranean fruit flies (medflies). And of course, you can sell their eggs if you have a surplus.

Learn more about chicken and medflies

Goats

We don’t have cows or bees because we think goats already bring enough responsibilities. They need a proper place that protects them from the wind and rain.

Their place needs to be cleaned out once a week, or once every three to four months when you use a deep litter system. The cleaned–out stuff can best be composted; the compost that comes out of the process is great for the vegetable garden. So there are skills that come with these activities, like making compost.

Goats can get ill or injured, and there is a whole skill set that comes with that. I was very lucky with our vet, who was willing to teach me a lot about goat healthcare, including using syringes and keeping the goats healthy in the first place.

Learn more about Keeping Goats

Goat Mum and her just born babies — Mams and her just born babies.

We started with goats because they are excellent land clearers. They eat lots of tough shrubs no other animal would challenge, like brambles and other prickly bushes.

For us, having goat milk and making our own cheese increased our joy of running a homestead. We soon discovered that people in our community also liked the milk and cheese, so we started to sell the surplus. We were sold out quickly because there appeared to be a big demand for goat dairy, and so this became one of our main homestead products.

Selling Food Products Commercially

When your homestead starts producing more than your family can use, selling the surplus can become both an income stream and a way to share your work with the community. Moving from home use to commercial sales, however, requires a new set of skills beyond just caring for animals or processing food.

Suddenly, the kitchen has to meet food and safety regulations, like hygiene standards. The simple milking parlor has to be upgraded too.

Selling skills like presenting your produce and building customer trust become important. Customers expect a steady supply, so planning production and managing seasonal variations becomes part of the job.

Cheese making on Monchique Homestead — Making cheese in our professional cheese kitchen

Renewable energy and water systems

A truly resilient homestead doesn’t stop at food — energy and water security are just as important.

Solar panels can reduce electricity costs, while rainwater harvesting, greywater systems, and gravity-fed irrigation make your garden less vulnerable to dry spells. However, these systems often require bigger upfront investments; not all of us are able to do so.

It’s not only about installing expensive infrastructure. The real value lies in the skills you build around managing these resources. Learning how to set up a simple rainwater tank, repair a leaky hose, or design a gravity-fed irrigation line with basic materials can make your garden more resilient without heavy investment.

Over time, you might add solar panels, pumps, or larger tanks, but knowing how to work with what you have is just as important. These skills — from basic plumbing repairs to creative problem-solving — ensure that you can adapt in dry spells and keep your homestead running even when resources are limited.

Luckily, we have a small creek that runs even in the hot summers. The water taken from upstream feeds a semi–gravity–fed system. Part of this water goes into the orchard for irrigation with a pump; part of it runs through our self-made filter system for the household and the dairy.

For electricity, we depend on the grid. The investment in a standalone solar system is too big for us. Since most of Portugal’s (reliable) energy production is renewable, we are fine with that. The overall costs of a kWh made by a standalone solar system and from the grid do not differ for the first 10 years. After that, maintenance costs are increasing for a standalone system, so for us, there is no reason to switch.

And by the way: a solar system does not make you independent of all the geopolitics in the world—just check where your solar panels and the spare parts that you need are coming from…

DIY repairs and maintenance

Every homestead has its share of breakdowns — a pipe bursts, a fence collapses, or a tool goes dull. Being able to handle repairs yourself saves money, time, and frustration. Simple carpentry, plumbing, and tool maintenance are often enough to keep things running smoothly.

One of the things that frequently needs repair is our electric fence that keeps the goats in and the wild boar out. It’s a kilometer-long fence; it’s not always easy to find where the glitch is.

Electric fence machine in the goat place — Our electric fence machine in the goat house.

Last winter, we had a very hard time with it. In a very wet winter, the wild boar get very active, so they came through the fence, breaking it several times, digging deep trenches in the orchard. The boar were also making holes in the fence, which the goats happily used to get into the neighbor’s orchard. What a disaster!

Once the wild boar find their way in, it is really hard to get them out again. It took us weeks to restore all the damage, but thanks to our experience with electric fencing and our persistence, we did manage. Now peace is back in the orchard.

Running a Business for an Income

Selling surplus like eggs, cheese, fruit, and vegetables can be a good source of income. Adding value to these products like baking cakes, making cheese, jams, and chutneys can even bring in a bit more. For a small homestead, this is often not enough to finance everything, especially if you want to do some investments in building or renewable energy projects.

Another way you can generate an income as a homesteader is by sharing your knowledge through on-site classes or online courses.

If you have the possibility of renting out a cottage, offering farm stays, or running experiences for visitors, this can also create steady income.

Monchique Homestead holiday house — Our Holiday Cottage

Business Mindset

Even a homestead business needs basic planning — knowing costs, pricing, and how to reach customers.

Homesteading sounds very romantic and is often presented as a way out. But to tell the truth, it is also very down to earth once you start a homestead. It requires somewhat of a business mindset and business skills to finance yourself and your homestead.

For our income generation, it is necessary to see part of the homestead as a business. Because of Tom’s age, he has a small Dutch state pension now; that makes it a little easier for us to get our finances organized. With some extra dairy income, course giving, and cottage rental income, we are good.

It’s just that we have a lot of activities going on, and we’re not getting any younger. So we are trying to reduce our activities without giving up our self-sufficiency. Our best chance to keep our income steady is to put more emphasis on organizing courses and just keep the dairy production for home consumption. This way, we can reduce the number of goats, which will decrease our labor input a lot in hours and in intensity, while keeping our income steady.

By staying self-sufficient food-wise and doing a lot ourselves, we can keep our costs of living low and our quality of living high.

The Mindset Behind True Self-Sufficiency

Homesteading success is as much mental as it is physical. You can learn to plant vegetables, milk goats, or build fences, but it’s the mindset that carries you through the hard days and makes the lifestyle sustainable over the long term.

From Frustration to Problem Solving

On a homestead, things rarely go exactly as planned. Weather can change the plans for the day, pests eat your dinner, and the drinking water system breaks when you have your holiday house full of tourists. However frustrating, frustration doesn’t solve the problem, it will only ruin your day even more. Instead of seeing these as disasters, it’s wiser to treat them as challenging puzzles to solve.

Building Monchique Homestead dairy kitchen — Building our Dairy Kitchen

“The expert in anything was once a beginner.” – Helen Hayes

Books and courses are valuable, but the reality is that most homestead skills come through trial and error. You learn to prune trees by cutting and watching how they respond. You learn to fix plumbing by taking it apart, getting it wrong, and then trying again. This hands-on approach not only builds competence but also confidence — the belief that you can figure things out as you go.

Sustainability as a Way of Thinking

Self-sufficiency isn’t about doing everything yourself — it’s about working smarter with what you have. By reusing materials, finding creative solutions, and cutting unnecessary expenses, you create systems that last. Every choice, from how you water your garden to how you build a fence, can save resources while keeping the land healthy. True independence comes from building a homestead that supports both your needs and the earth’s, season after season.

I love tool shops—for gardening or building—not to buy things but to see all the different tools and materials that could potentially solve a problem. It’s a big inspiration tour for me. And if there is something to repair or design, I use this inspiration and make a cheaper, more resilient version of what I saw.

Building Community While Living Independently

When people think of homesteading, they often picture doing it all alone. But that is not the reality for a lot of homesteaders. It might start with a neighbor lending you a tool you don’t own yet, or you offering them a basket of extra aubergines. Before long, you’re trading eggs for honey, helping with a goat hoof trim in exchange for a hand during harvest, or teaming up to split the cost of bulk grain. These exchanges aren’t just practical — they build trust and resilience.

Slowly, these little trades weave together because it makes sense for everyone. It’s not about keeping score, but about knowing you’re part of something bigger than your own gate.

Self-sufficiency, it turns out, isn’t a lonely path. It’s a kind of interdependence that makes your independence stronger.

Collecting fire wood on Monchique Homestead — A friend is helping us to collect fire wood

Bartering cheese for seedlings is something I often do. Keeping goats and making dairy is a lot of work, that means we often have no time to raise seedlings. Other people in the community who love cheese and are able to put more time into growing seedlings are also happy with the barter. It’s an enrichment for both.

Taking Your Next Step

Homesteading isn’t about owning a big farm, cutting ties with modern life, or living only in the countryside. It’s a flexible lifestyle — one that can start with a balcony garden, a small flock of hens, or a few jars of homemade preserves.

If you already grow some food, you’re on the path. The next step might be learning to preserve your harvest, trying your hand at cheese-making, or exploring small livestock. Each skill builds on the last and brings you closer to a more resilient, rewarding homestead life.

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