Welcome to Homesteading with Hyacynth! Homesteading with Hyacynth is a monthly look at ways to lead a healthy, greener, more sustainable life. My intent with Homesteading with Hyacynth is to offer genuine, practical experiences and humorous and helpful tips. Of course, I am not a medical professional so these are my tips and what worked for my family.
Maybe you read the title of this post, and your first thought was, “what with who?”
So about that.
My name is Hyacynth {like the flower, but a person}, and I have this ever-growing desire to live much the way our great grandparents lived back when homesteading wasn’t a trend or word we looked up in the dictionary, but rather it was, well, life.
You know: big garden, simple home, big family and abundant, satisfying life.
Except with the {occasional} air conditioning and {moderate use of} Internet and {daily dance with the} Vitamix, the washing machine and electricity thrown in because, well, there’s no need to go hog wild and abandon all things go about technology; those inventions, to call out a few, are worthy and would have knocked great grandma’s homesteading socks off!
But others not so much. Some of the invents of the past several decades would have great-grandma asking when Jesus was coming back. It leaves some of us craving simpler, healthier days … times when we didn’t have to think about a dirty dozen while shopping, antibiotics in our burgers, fruits on steroids, frankenfish like GMO salmon, or over-saturation of chemicals in homes or on our skin after a shower. To the day when dirt didn’t hurt, food was good for us, and the people who grew it didn’t need a hazmat suit to tend to it or a chemistry degree to produce it. Reading about some of the “farming” methods used in modern-day production didn’t leave us with a case of the twitches and sci-fi-esque nightmares of GMO salmon overtaking the world.
These things that would have left grandma fretting all used to freak me out to the point where I felt like an overwhelmed basket case who couldn’t make a trip to the grocery store without twitching because I couldn’t figure out what changes to implement — it seemed like everything needed to change so we could lead a healthier lifestyle. Because let’s face it: if you read the health and wellness blogs or even consume news, everything seems like it’s trying to kill us — from hormone-laced milk and hormone-disrupting beauty products to salmonella-soaked spinach or even tainted Tylenol.
In our family’s early quest to live a healthier lifestyle, I ended up doing just the opposite: I started stressing and obsessing over everything. And, friends, if you’re trying to get healthier, stress doesn’t actually help!
After years of reporter-style research into everything health and wellness and myriad changes to our lifestyle, it wasn’t until this past year that I took a good look at what tradition has to offer us.
There’s wisdom in the ways we once lived:
- eating food from the local land and eating seasonally
- using grandma’s medicine of good old chicken soup for a cold
- incorporating essential oils into our cleaning and immune-system boosting
- resting well and destressing
- plus way, way more!
And there’s wisdom in incorporating tradition and blending it with the technology that can make tradition less tedious.
That’s where we’re going to land every time we get together here in this virtual space — at the intersection where traditional wisdom and the brilliant parts of technology meet.
A place where we’re all the healthier and happier because of that meeting.
And a place where we feel like we can really make a go at this healthy lifestyle through simple homesteading all while rocking life with the littles in Lake County, Illinois.
So. Let’s talk. What would you most like to read about here? Leave a comment and I will try and tackle it!
by Hyacynth Worth
Hyacynth Worth is wife to John and mother to two boys and three girls. She writes about motherhood, healthy living, and faith at Undercover Mother. She is a local writer and the author of Homesteading with Hyacynth. She promises to be candid, amusing and only slightly neurotic. Most of the time.
I would love to read more about essential oils. I’m really not sure what to use for what.
Ashley, yes! Thanks for commenting! We’ll definitely tackle essential oils.
You hit the nail on the head. This is our ultimate goal as well. Affordability and what to do during winter months would be my topic selections. It is easy to live and shop in healthy ways during summer and fall, but come winter it gets much harder.
Yes, Alita, yes. We’ll definitely be talking about the winter months. Those are harder months for sure!
Any and everything you share will be good 🙂 Looking forward to getting into all that research you have done! Gut healing is on my mind.
Oh, Colleen! Yes! Great idea! We’ll talk gut healing for sure. Probably when it gets colder outside because the healing regimen is more suitable palate wise, in my opinion, when it’s chilly outside!