About me
Hello, I’m Michaela
I am learning to homestead from scratch — and I am doing it from a flat, with no land, no barn, and a windowsill that gets four good hours of light a day.
For years I had a picture in my head. A kitchen with the door open. Something rising under a cloth on the counter. Rows of beans outside, and washing on a line, and the particular quiet of a place where most of what you need is made rather than bought.
I also had a plan, and the plan was to wait. Wait for land. Wait until we could afford it. Wait until the life looked like the picture, and then learn how to live it.
I don’t remember the exact day I realised how backwards that was. I only remember standing in my kitchen holding a very flat loaf of bread and thinking: if I can’t get this right with a shop-bought bag of flour and an oven that works, what exactly am I expecting to happen when there is a whole smallholding depending on me?
Why I write this down
The waiting is the apprenticeship
So I stopped waiting and started practising. Bread first, because it humbled me most. Then a windowsill of herbs, then two rabbits, then preserving, then a shelf I built badly out of a free pallet and am unreasonably proud of.
None of it is impressive. That is rather the point. Every week I pick one small thing I don’t know how to do, I do it clumsily, and I write down what happened — including the parts where it went wrong, because those are the parts I actually learn from and the parts nobody else seems willing to publish.
If you are reading this from a flat, or a rented house, or a life that looks nothing like the picture in your head yet: you can start today. Not with land. With one skill. That is the whole idea, and it is the only thing I am really qualified to tell you.
Where I’m up to
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A starter named Agnes
January 2026 — Flour and water in a jar on top of the fridge. She died twice before I understood that a cold Highveld kitchen needs a warmer spot than I was giving her.
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Clementine and Bo
January 2026 — Two rabbits, bought before I had properly researched anything. We all survived my learning curve, but they deserved better planning.
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The first preserving
May 2026 — Preserved lemons, because it was citrus season and they are almost impossible to ruin. A gentle place to start.
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A shelf, more or less square
June 2026 — My first build. Four millimetres out on one bracket. Still up, still holding jars.
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Right now
Tomato seedlings under the window waiting for spring, a starter that finally behaves, and a long list of things I still cannot do.
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart.Colossians 3:23
My faith is not a section of this blog, it is the reason there is one. I believe that small, ordinary, unwatched work — a fed starter, a swept floor, a row of seeds — is worth doing well, and that God is not in a hurry with me. You will find that woven through what I write rather than bolted onto the end of it.
What you’ll find here
Wander through
The letter
Learn alongside me
One letter, most Sundays — the new diary entry, what is happening on the windowsill, and the thing I got wrong that week.