Episode 256 - Homestead Burnout is a Thing

How can we recognize homestead burnout, and how can we deal with it.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Good morning, am I. I think today's the thirteenth, and
here I am at the end of the driveway looking
for a place to get out between cars. So think
I did it fairly quickly. That's a good thing. Okay,
So what we're gonna talk about today, Well, a couple
of days ago, sometime this week, Nicole Sauce, who has

(00:24):
the podcast Living Free in Tennessee Push has all kinds
of other uh things going on. I think they have
a festival and they teach a bunch of classes and
she sells coffee and all kinds of stuff, so she's
a busy woman. Ah. And she did a podcast episode

(00:44):
this week on homestead burnout and there that is a
thing for real. I think I quoted somebody statistic at
one point in time that from the time people buy
their land to they give up and move off is

(01:04):
about eighteen months. And that's kind of scary because this is,
you know, to leave the city and a life you've
always had and moved to the country. And then I
have somebody who's decided to pass me with oncoming traffic.
That's a bright idea, and you know, take up the

(01:27):
rural lifestyle and you only make it about eighteen months.
That's not say it a lot, because it's not easy.
And that's one of the reasons why I decided to
start doing this podcast. I don't know if I've helped
anybody with that process, but to understand that living in
the country is different, and it is especially if you're

(01:51):
going to be If your goal is to be more
self sufficient, then you have to there are a lot
of things you have to do, stuff you have to
give up if that's what you really want to do.
And some people are good with that. Sometimes I think
people don't understand what that actually means. And her talk

(02:13):
about homestead burnout was pretty on point, especially this time
of the year, especially down here in Texas, and she's
in Tennessee and they probably have a hot weather too,
but not to the extent that we do. Because right
now it's August. It's hot, excuse me, and it is
August in my line of work, when we're trying to

(02:35):
get school started everywhere is a hard time of the year.
So we are extremely busy at work and you know,
this is just hard. So there's a dog there on
side of the road, ages sitting there, and so it's

(02:58):
very easy to get burned. Out. It's easy to get
burned out. That's one of the reasons I don't have
animals of any kind. You know, I've always said if
I started with some kind of livestock, it would be
chickens because they are small and easily contained and would
not be quite as involved as the other types of livestock.

(03:20):
But having grown up with lot, I mean, we had horses,
we had cows, we had chickens. I don't think we
had a pig in my lifetime. We never had goats,
but we had enough that what happens is on my
homestead is that if you have livestock, that's a seven
day a week with no break commitment. I mean, because

(03:44):
they have to have feed, they have to have water.
If you have a milk cow or milk goats, they
have to be milked. I mean, you don't get to say,
you know, I don't really feel like doing this today.
That's non option. The fruits and vegetables are not why
that big a deal. And you know, if I stop
watering my tomatoes and they die, and you know, it's like, okay,

(04:07):
well too bad, so sad, But I will not have
caused something a living being suffering because I didn't take
care of them. So that's one of the things that
people have to realize when they commit to livestock is
that you have committed yourself to taking care of another
living being and that completely depends on you. So that's

(04:29):
an important point. One of the things that Nicole said
that that they try to do is they try to
take one day a month. She calls it as a
reset and a reset. I got the impression it was
like a day off and so, and the day off

(04:51):
meant that they left the homestead for a day off.
So you know, that might or my not be able
to be possible, depending on your situation. I'm trying to
think if I I have I take time off from work,
and I do usually take off at least a day

(05:14):
a month, depends on you know, if it's a month,
it's got a holiday, we get that in there. For example,
you know, Labor Day is coming up, so we will
have Labor Day off, so that'll be a day off
in September. In October, sister is heaving surgery and the
same week is the International Quilt Festival in Houston, and

(05:38):
I volunteered to be a I have offered to be
a volunteer at the at the quilt show, which I
think will be really fun. So that's gonna be my
reset for I mean for October. So I'll do that.
But you know, we're we've never been big vacation people.
And I think that probably comes with how we raised

(06:00):
because first we did have livestock. But in addition to that,
at least now, not when sister was growing up, because
my father did not have his welding truck, but when
I was, when I was growing up, he did. And
so we spent our summers off somewhere, you know, in
some little bitty poduct town in some other part of Texas,

(06:22):
because that's where he was on a job. So we
never you know what, I guess you could call that
maybe a vacation for us because we were in a
different place. Certainly wasn't a vacation for him. So and
and summer was his busiest time because he was more
likely to have work. You know, brig welding is not,
especially if you're an independent contractor. You work when people

(06:44):
call you work. And so he he worked steadier in
the summertime than he did in the wintertime. Usually what
would happen is he would work through the summer through
the fall, and about Christmas it would shut down and
then he would be at home, you know, during the wintertime,
which is good because that's what he needed to be

(07:06):
feeding the cows because during the summertime they could eat
grass in the pastures, so that worked out. But you know,
we just never were big vacation people. We didn't go
a lot of places when I was a child. Actually,
I think we had this conversation the other day at
a meeting because my uh my boss man said that,

(07:31):
you know, when he was growing up, he remembered they
went on one big trip in his lifetime, and he said, now,
the expectation is that you go on at least one
trip every year, sometimes more than one. And he's got
a point because of you know, more current generations expect

(07:51):
to be able to travel and take vacations and go
to sometimes some reasonably expensive places. That obviously was not
an issue when I was a child. We didn't do
that kind of thing. One thing we did do in
the summer. But as he said, there was one big
trip in his childhood, there was one big trip in ours.
We went to the Hemisphair in San Antonio, and I

(08:15):
think that was in sixty eight, because back in the
sixties we had the series of World's Fairs and they
were in different places. I know sister went to one herself,
because you know, she was I don't know if I've
ever said this, but there's like nearly fourteen years difference
in our ages. So she was of the first generation children.

(08:37):
I was in the second generation children. Our parents raised
two sets, and so she was grown. I don't even
remember her living at home when I was little because
I was three when she graduated, and then she went off,
you know, and did her own thing. So one time
she went to the World's Fair in New York I

(08:59):
think when it was there. But obviously we don't do
those kinds of things now. We still do have the Olympics,
which is a worldwide event, or we have the I
think there's gonna be a World Cup, but there's gonna
be something about soccer that's gonna be in the United
States this year because you know, all the talk is
about the terrorist threat anyway. But back then we did

(09:22):
have big events, and one of those was the Hemisphere,
which was I don't know if that was a World's
Fair or a like half since it said hemisphere, but
it was basically the western uh hemisphere hemisphere, so you had,
you know, we had there was a lot of things

(09:42):
from South America that we had North America. I don't
know that we necessarily had exhibits from other countries besides that.
But anyway, we did go to that when I was
a child, and we saw the you know, we saw
the sites in San Antonio and we also did the fair.

(10:03):
So that was our one vacation that I remember growing up.
But anyway, back to Nicole's talk, she was talking about
the fact that, you know, it's very easy on a
homestead to get burned out. And one of things she
talked about is, you know, one person trying to do
the work of ten or and this is a big deal.

(10:27):
And I think this happens a lot. Is that people
who post on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube what they're doing on
their homestead. They always post. Obviously, everybody wants to put
their best foot forward, so they always post the good things.

(10:48):
They show you all their successes, they show you, you know,
how beautiful the garden is and how glorious all their
can goods are and all that kind of stuff. They
don't talk about her show you when things don't go well. Well,
Apparently she had a a part of her garden that

(11:09):
she wanted to do a garden tour, and she went
off on a trip and she came back and her
automatic watering system, which is very likely to fail, especially
if you're gone. That's one reason this year I didn't
do the automatic gardening, but I was home every day,
so that makes a big difference. She said, it failed,

(11:32):
and so that you know, what looked really great before
she left was just about dead when she got home.
And it doesn't take much, okay, especially if you have
raised beds the water. If you don't water those when
it's hot and not raining, they will burn up in
a heartbeat. So she, you know, she was fussing about

(11:53):
the fact that she didn't she wanted to do a
garden tour. Now latarbo and and she calls this guy tactical.
So I don't know what he is and what relationship
he is to her, but he said, well, you really
ought to show it anyway, because it shows that not

(12:15):
only do you have successes on your homestead, but you
also have failures on your homestead, and that will help people,
you know, understand that not everything is perfect, and so
she decided to do that so they would see, this
is what happens when your automatic irrigation fails and you're
not home. Okay, and that is true. And you know

(12:38):
that's not a big deal at this point in time,
because you know, if the to made us burned up,
or the you know we didn't like, for example, I
didn't get a whole lot of green beans, Well we
can go the store and buy green beans. Now there
may come a day when we cannot, uh, and we
have you know, been risk. Part of reading the Texas
history is how did these people deal with the fact

(12:59):
that there was snow grocery store even the stuff that
they did get, Like the story we told about the
all the ships coming in excuse me, to the Gulf
coast and there was, as she called it, a customs
house in Lynville, be it got raided by the Indians. Okay.

(13:21):
So you know, even though you even though in many
cases they may have ordered stuff from far away and
they had to order very large quantities of something that
they couldn't produce themselves, they it still wasn't a dune
deal that they were gonna get it. Because in this case,
they lost everything and they purchased it, they paid for it,
and they didn't get it. There was no insurance for that.

(13:44):
You just you know, were out of the stuff that
you had ordered. So we don't live in that kind
of world, but people have in the past. And one
of my biggest issues is that if it happened in
the past, it could happen again in the future, even

(14:04):
though we don't think it can because you know, it's
not happened in our past. Well, okay, that's that might
be a little iffy. I don't know about that, Gamel.
So if it is possible to and very probable to
have homestead burnout, what are some things that we can

(14:25):
do to kind of mitigate that? And that's going to
be and I'm, you know, preaching this message to myself
as much as anybody else. First of all, I try
to do more than there is one human that can do.
Especially with a full time job. I don't tend to
take vacations. So there's that one of the things that

(14:48):
I want to get back to doing because I have
not been doing it, especially during the summer when I
get home at the end of the day, especially on
the days that I have something after or work. Okay,
I go work out, or I go buy groceries or whatever.
Yesterday I made a trip to another town to go

(15:09):
to hobby lobby to take the crosstitch project to get framed.
So there's all, you know, different things happen in different days.
But I get home late. I don't get home till
six o'clock. By the time I fix something to eat
and I sit down, well then it's you know, closer

(15:31):
to seven o'clock. If it's during the summertime when I
have to water and pick tomatoes, which I've been doing
for probably about the last two months. By the time
I do that, and I usually spend it probably an
hour in the garden, well then precent it's time to
get ready to go to bed, So there's not any
time to just sit and do needlework or something that

(15:54):
would be relaxing that I would be able to consider
an activity I enjoy and you know, helps me relax.
So it's you know, it's tough time in the summertime,
and on Saturdays it's you know, I have to get
up and Saturday is my only day to sleep in.

(16:15):
And I am not an by choice, an early riser.
Someday when I do retire. The one thing that I
will look forward to most of all is not having
some alarm clock, because actually I would do much better
if I could sleep to about seven o'clock every morning,

(16:37):
just like by the time the sunking, you know, it
gets light. I'm good. That does not happen, or has
not happened for my entire lifetime, because obviously I've always worked,
and so you know, I get up every morning, I
having a law, I set alarm, I have to get

(16:57):
up and whatever. And you know, getting up in the dark,
getting ready in the dark in the winter time, you're
basically driving to work in the dark. So you know,
that's just that's not the natural rhythm of my body.
It just and if I'm ever off, it quickly reverts
to what it wants to be and my normal get

(17:19):
my actual preferred getting uptime. I'm not a person that's
gonna sleep all day, but if I could sleep till
about seven o'clock in the morning or seven point thirty,
I'd be good. And so Saturday is the only day
I get to do that. So I do not set
an alarm on Saturday. I get up when I wake up,
But The problem with that is in the summertime, it's

(17:41):
so hot that if I've got to go do stuff
in the garden that takes longer than just watering and picking,
like I have to fertilize the tomatoes, I have to weed,
I have to do something that's going to take more
effort than I have to do that early in the
morning because about ten o'clock it's too ought to be
out there. So the summertime is hard, and that is

(18:04):
one of those things that contributes to the burnout. Uh.
You know, this time of year, as I said, this
is busy time at work. It'll be a while before
we get to take a get a breath, and you
know at the coming point and you just go, I'm
just tired. And this is a problem. I mean, we

(18:27):
think that's like poor pitiful us. We're just tired. That's
what people have faced forever. And our version of tired,
and and the version of tired that people had in
the past is that's that is one reason why I
feel guilty if I feel burned out, is because the

(18:47):
people in the past, what we have to do for work,
they would consider a vacation because they didn't have all
of the conveniences that we have, and if their garden
and grow there was no food, we don't have that
kind of stress. So you know, in some cases you
want to go I just need to suck it up

(19:08):
because it's you know, just life. You just have to
do it. But I think she's got a point in that,
A we need to make sure that we don't take
on more than we can do, and we don't worry
about what other people think or what it looks like
and that kind of stuff. But in addition to that
that we need to intentionally at least a sometime off.

(19:33):
You know, one of the things that people did in
the past and we don't weed are not as good
about this as they used to be, and that is
Sundays now. Taking Sundays with a grain of salt, because
what people used to do on Sundays they went to church.
If they were in a location where they had to

(19:56):
travel a long distance a long distance to church, they
would pack a picnic lunch and they would eat, you know,
have church service, and then they would eat lunch as
we'd Baptists call it dinner on the ground, and then
they would you know, have some more church. So it
was not a I mean, it wasn't like you'd laid around.

(20:18):
You actually were involved in doing something. But it wasn't
the farm work you did at the house. Uh. The
Germans in the like the Fredericksburg area, what they had
a lot of them is they had something they called
Sunday houses, and they were little houses that they built

(20:39):
in town. And when the they built the Sunday houses,
what that what they would do is they would come
into their let's see if this what this person is doing. Okay,
looking for a parking space, We'll go with this one.

(21:02):
They built this little house in town in Fredericksburg, and
they would come in on Saturday and see that gave
them time to go to you know, the store and
buy supplies and all that kind of stuff. They would
spend the night in the Sunday house and then they

(21:24):
would go to church on Sunday, okay, and then after
church they would pack up bother stuff and they would
go back to their ranch or their farm that was
farther out in the country because you know, travel was
hard back then. So that's just an example in I know,
like in my community. First of all, a small country

(21:47):
church might not have a full time pastor so they
would have what you know, used to be called a
circuit riding preacher. And what those guys would do is
they would like they would go to they might have
four churches, and so every Sunday of the month they

(22:07):
would be in a different church. And I know our
when we went to church in the country, that's what
ours had been at one point in time. So I
guess the whole point of this is to when we're
looking at what all needs to be done on our homestead,

(22:29):
trying to get work done, trying that A we don't
need to be judging ourselves by what's going to online
in social media, and B we need to intentionally take
time to relax, and that is the hardest, Like, for example,
we don't you know, Sunday is not necessarily a day

(22:50):
of rest now, taking that with the greatest salt, it wasn't,
at least for the women. Wasn't much of a day
of rest back then because women were still expected to
feed all these people in the family and that part
didn't change whether it was Sunday or not. Now, a
lot of times they might prepare some stuff on Saturday

(23:12):
to have for Sunday, and that's one of the things
we kind of do, we fix, and generally it's niece.
She does most of the cooking at this point. She'll
fix dinner on Saturday night and then whatever we have
we will have that also for Sunday lunch, and so

(23:33):
we're not cooking when we get home church, and that
does help. So just think about what are some ways
that you can help yourself not be burned out. I
do love living in the country. I don't want to
ever have to live in town if that's possible. You know, someday,

(23:56):
if I get to the point where I can't take
care of this place, that's I'll have to cross the
bridge when I get to it. But it's important to
do things that bring relaxation and but also have a
a realistic view of what we can get done and

(24:17):
what we can't get done. And I'm really bad about that. Anyway.
I have arrived at work speaking of things to do,
because there's a whole bunch. I will talk to you tomorrow.
We will do the next installment in Mary Maverick's Diary,