How to Prepare for 2022 & Beyond - Inflation, Recession & More

Inflation continues to go up and grocery prices are only going to get higher. Our number one goal when becoming homesteaders six years ago, was to become more self-sufficient by growing all our own food.

We've learned so much from Amish neighbors about growing food. Here’s a list of things we’ve been doing to become more self-sufficient:

1. We purchased a wood cook stove

Our Amish friends invited us over for a dinner they had prepared on their wood cook stove. We loved it so much we bought our own. The one we bought will heat for 11 hours, and we can cook all our food on it. It was a great investment for cooking completely off grid.

2. Planting and growing

We're growing more seeds this year than we have our entire lives. We're growing a ton of cabbage, cauliflower, and tomatoes. Our kitchen window is filled with seedlings.

Why are we growing so much? Because grocery prices are going through the roof. Inflation is just going to keep going up, so we want to be self-sufficient.

3. Gathering firewood

Next year we're going to try to heat our entire home with all the firewood we cut down from our own property. We live in a huge pine forest where the trees are growing like weeds. It gets to the point where it becomes dangerous, and I must thin some out because it's becoming a fire hazard.

4. Water collection

We've got IBC totes now, so we're collecting our own water.

5. Extra income

We have several businesses on our homestead. We're currently building a pioneer-style log cabin right here on our property. We’re building it completely off the grid using only hand tools, no chainsaws, and no power tools. We're even cutting the logs down from our property with hand tools. The cabin will be decorated with pioneer-style furnishings from the era.

We also have our Airbnb rental. We get a lot of folks visiting that want to see what it's like living on a homestead. That’s another business we work on here on the homestead, making upgrades and taking new photos for the website.

We run a dog kennel on the homestead. It's an off-grid cabin we converted into a dog kennel and it’s been booking up. We made coupons and flyers.

People ask us, how do you pay for your homestead? How do you afford it? The answer is, with all these businesses we run 100% from our homestead.

6. Cooking and storing

We're also preparing for 2022 by getting better at cooking our own food as another way to save money. We've been baking a lot and doing some long-term food storage. We got Mylar bags and we stored up some flour and canned goods for long-term food storage in 2022.

We're building out the gardens and canning a ton of food. We just canned a whole bunch of strawberry jam. We're going to be canning so much food and dehydrating and vacuum sealing. We’re freezing food that we get out of our garden. We got a new vacuum sealer, and vacuum sealed some of our leftover seeds so we can use them next year.

My Amish neighbors invited me to join them for ice harvesting. This happens once a year in the Amish community. We went to a pond on the coldest day of the year and they took huge chunks of ice out of the pond. They use that ice to refrigerate their food completely off-grid for an entire year.

How to prepare for 2022 and beyond

As you can see, we've been very busy on our homestead getting prepared. I feel like we really haven't even scratched the surface when we hang out with our Amish friends. They are so far ahead of us.

Let me know how you're preparing for 2022 and beyond in the comments below.