Homesteading-ish 2025

Today I'm talking with Dawn at Homesteading-ish. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.

00:11 Today I'm talking with Dawn at Homesteading-ish  in West Virginia. Good afternoon, Dawn. How are you?  Great. It's nice to be here.  Oh, thank you for being here. I appreciate it. So  you are  not  the, I don't know, founder of Homesteading-ish. You are part of Homesteading-ish. So tell me what Homesteading-ish is. uh

00:39 um So I'm actually one of the organizers for the event.  There are a couple of us that got together and decided that we wanted to bring something different to our community and trying to help people establish a homestead, know what to do, kind of help them build those foundational skills that they need in order to live off the land or be more sustainable, to  work on things that  they would like to do to help support their family,  providing

01:08 food or um whatever other things they might need in order to make their homestead work. So we put our heads together and kind of decided that we would go this route by bringing some non-traditional resources to the table and bringing people from not just the talking head and university world but from real life experience to the table that  could have an influence over how people view homesteading and small farm life. um So

01:37 That's how it was kind of born. uh it last year was our first year. It was a fantastic event. We had a great turnout. And  one of the things we love the most is that we really wanted to bring a more intimate environment. Um, we were able to really bring people together,  let them  talk with one another, meet one-on-one, actually have real life conversations in real time with people that are living a lifestyle that they are seeking to  be better at. So we were able to do that.

02:08 oh This year, I hope we're going to be able to bring that same kind of intimate atmosphere, the same kind of energy, the same kind of feeling to the table where people are really going to get to get into the bones  of what they're doing and why they want to do it and how they can  accomplish all of their goals.  Awesome. And when you're referring to last year, last year was the inaugural conference for Homosteading-ish.

02:33 It was, it was our very first one. So we were excited that it was so well received to be able to bring it back again a second year. Okay. So when I, when I interviewed Troy last year, cause Troy is the one that, that kind of kicked this all off from what I've been told.  He was just getting ready for the first conference and he was very, very, very excited  and a little bit nervous. I am not sure that.

03:01 I'm not sure that he really knew what he got himself into, number one, and how it was going to go, number two. That's kind of what was coming through.  And so how did last year go?  it, was it well received? Were there a lot of attendees, that kind of thing? So we were all a little bit nervous last year, not really knowing what we were going to get ourselves into and what people were going to think or how the event was going to go. But honestly, um there was

03:31 It almost was, I hate to even say it, but it was almost flawless. It went so well.  We had a lot of people that came from all across the country, people from as far away as  California down to Florida. um I think at one point we had at least a dozen states that were represented at the conference.  A lot of people were really hungry to receive the information that we were trying to invest in them.

03:57 people came and they loved it. They were screaming to come back and hoped that we would do it a second time. Again, it goes back to that  kind of we brought people to a place where it felt like home, where they were comfortable and they could ask the hard questions and get the hard answers and dig a little deeper into topics that they were interested in and actually get to speak with our presenters one-on-one. In some i