Thelife- Christina Heinritz and her husband, Trevor, built their own homestead in California.
- They are raising their daughters, ages 2 and 4, to live off the land.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Christina Heinritz, 33, who owns a homestead in Lincoln, California. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.
I grew up in the Bay Area — I didn't even have a dog growing up. No pets.
But when I started college at Chico State — right after my dad was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes — I declared my major in nutrition. I started going to his doctor's appointments and learning more about it. I was curious as to why we eat the way we do.
I wanted to know where my food came from, so I got into pig hunting, deer hunting, fishing, and archery. Then, I met my husband. He is an agricultural crop duster.
We left Chico and we moved to Lincoln to live with his parents. We wanted to start fresh and, at the time, there was no talk about buying raw land.
But this acreage came for sale right next to them. It was one of those things that just happened serendipitously. That was six years ago.
Homesteading wasn't our original plan
It really started with us getting chickens and then I started collecting every animal out there.
Our entire property was filled with poison oak, and I was super allergic to it – my husband would tear out berry bushes and would touch poison oak on the tractor, and I would get poison oak all over me. We really needed to take care of the problem.
So that's when we fenced in the property, and started to get some animals to eat the poison oak. We bought two alpacas on Craigslist, and it kind of spiraled from there — we got donkeys, we got goats.
We dove into homebuilding and homesteading. It really just fell into our laps. We did all the work on building our farm and our homestead, and it took us years of dedication to do it.
There's nothing easy about starting a homestead
We built in California, so there's nothing easy about it.
I have a lot of people that will come to me and say, "I want to build a house," and I say "It'd be easier just to buy something and remodel it." You have building permits, codes, so many different requirements. We had to put hurricane tiedown clips on our concrete, even though we live in California. It's just it's a whole nother ball game of building from the ground up.
The summer we started framing our first lumber job it was like 113 degrees that day. We built under every condition. Both of us had full time jobs and we worked every single day after work until 9 p.m., or 10 p.m. with flashlights, and every single weekend.
For years, we didn't go to a concert, we didn't eat out, we didn't buy new clothes. We were buying tools. Every single paycheck went to it. I don't think people understand the sacrifice that it takes to get to the point we're at.
We sold every single thing to build our dreams. For years, we put every single ounce of our time, money and energy — literally our physical bodies doing the labor. We were beat up from it. It's a lot of sacrifice for a lot of years.
The hardest part about it is that you don't get a day off. You can't just not feed your animals. Even if it's 100 degrees that day, you can't go sit by the pool, you have to watch your animals. It's like having kids — you don't necessarily sleep in the morning because even if you try to sleep in when light happens all the animals are yelling at you because they're hungry.
You have to watch your garden, you've got to watch your sprinklers on your plants. You can't just walk away from it as easily.
But all of it is worth it
I think for me, a homestead is just somehow sustaining your way of life through your property. It doesn't matter if you're vegetarian or if eat meat, or if you do eggs, or have a garden.
There's many homesteads that people have in a suburban townhouses, too.
You can get a pretty good sized garden with not that much land. I even know a lot of people that live in the city that make their own bread and make their own tinctures and grow a garden. There are so many different variations.
The best part about it is sitting back to see what you have created, the fruit of all your hard work.
Most recently, the best part for me is looking at the grass with a beautiful sunset view and watching our kids run around the lawn and pick fruit off our trees and eat it. It's watching them run around and pet the animals or have friends over to come enjoy it with us.
It's really beautiful to see every single trench like we dug to put irrigation lines in for the fruit trees years ago to now see my kids get to pick the fruit off the trees and eat it. It's a beautiful before and after.
We're now at a point where we're not doing any huge projects at the moment. And it's really beautiful to see how far we've come. That's really what it comes down to.
We are seeing so many people return to homesteading
A lot of young people are interested in starting homesteads because I think people are waking up to the food system. There's a lot of stuff that everyone thinks is healthy and it's not.
The best way to get quality nutrients for your body and your family is to know where your food comes from. And people have no other way to figure out than to raise it.
I don't feel that I am missing out on anything by homesteading
I think when you buy into this convenience lifestyle that everyone has, something is gonna suffer.
I think the more you teach your kids about scratch cooking and they can join you in the kitchen, that's more valuable than anything taught in the classroom and better for your body. So I don't think we're missing anything.
And I think as a society, there's gonna be more of a push in that direction.