I am Ann-Marie and I am so happy you’re here! Welcome to Our City Homestead! Let me pour you a cup of tea or old fashioned lemonade and get you a plate of something sweet and share Five Years of Our City Homestead with you!
I started Our City Homestead five years ago as a way to bring old fashioned farmhouse living to the city. “Simple Country Living in the City” is our catch phrase after all.
Initially, we began sharing our love of old fashioned pioneer life, but through the years that’s simply changed to sharing good old fashioned living in the heart of the city.
We took those old fashioned values, ways, skills and recipes and brought them into our modern lifestyle. Skills like cooking from scratch, making bread with simple ingredients, baking from scratch, sewing and crocheting, gardening as well as canning and preserving garden produce.
We share old recipes of times gone by and immerse ourselves in history and food history while sharing what we learn about various eras like The Great Depression, Wartime Ration Cooking, early pioneer life and so much more. We share what we learn about our community and those who built it.
I have a love of the old ways. I know they struggled “in the old days” and life was full of hardships, but there’s something about how they built community, how skilled they were, their problem solving ability in order to simply survive, how they worked together, their work ethic, how they built something from hardly nothing and their creativity and ingenuity that’s inspiring.
The bulk of what we share are recipes. I have a love of old recipes especially. I began collecting recipes when I was a teenager and cookbooks — all kinds of cookbooks — when I was in my twenties. There’s something about those old recipes that draws me in. I enjoy reading them, especially the language in which they are written. I like trying new recipes, making them, and sharing how they turned out. I always share any modifications we may have made for today’s cooking and baking.
I think about the women in those olden days when I’m gardening or kneading bread — all the work they had to do – the laundry they washed by hand; the garden they needed to grow, the animals they tended to; the butter making and cheese making; candle making; all the cooking they had to do for their large families; having to cook with what was on hand; baking sweet treats everyone loved and looking after everyone, not to mention sewing clothes and mending, quilting and much more. They had to cook and bake and garden simply to survive. They were definitely strong, resilient and hardworking. Everything was done by hand. I know they did what they needed to just to survive, but it is still inspiring to me. Our lives today are so much different. We really do have it pretty good.
We have learned a lot about our heritage and culture through the last 5 years, and what the early settlers would have done. Not everyone had access to a flour mill, so settlers needed to grind their own wheat at home. The photo below shows how a pioneer would have made their own stone ground wheat on their farm in order to feed their large family and the men who came to help harvest the fields. The wheat would be ground several times to create a nice flour that could be used to make bread or bake with.
The kitchen is the heart of the home. It’s where we gather. It’s where we cook together, eat and talk about our day. It’s where we socialize and visit with friends and family, creating community and sense of belonging. It’s where we try out recipes and where we preserve food. It’s where we nourish ourselves and our souls. It’s where we create memories. That’s why we share a lot of recipes and good old fashioned cooking and baking, along with some other delicious more modern recipes.
We like to share our hobbies too like an assortment of fun crafts the whole family can enjoy, and pastimes too like sewing, crocheting and cross stitching.
I like sharing our love of gardening. It’s where we can let our troubles go, dig in the dirt and watch how something from a tiny seed can grow into a wonderful plant that provides us food. It really is amazing to see and we are ever so grateful to be able to garden.
Gardening was such an integral part of pioneer life and even much before pioneer times. Our ancestors have grown food for hundreds and hundreds of years. They knew how to forage and what wild plants were edible and which were not. They grew onions and root vegetables, cabbage and greens and much more. They preserved their food in various ways. They planted crops and helped each other during famines and hard times. It’s amazing to read stories about what our ancestors experienced and how they persevered. There’s so much to learn.
We bring the old fashioned into today and we are enjoying it.
It’s hard to believe Our City Homestead is Five Years Old!! It’s been challenging at times. I will admit I became discouraged. I took some comments to heart and decided to take a break from Our City Homestead because I did not know what direction I wanted to go. I unfortunately got caught up in multi-level marketing which took my time away from Our City Homestead. I essentially lost two years worth of posts because of it all… until I realized why I started Our City Homestead in the first place. I ditched the network marketing, (it just is not for me), so I could focus on my dream — making Our City Homestead the best it could be and sharing something that’s more meaningful. I am so glad I did. I have loved the recipes we have shared – the different breads, the recipes from the 1940s, the 12 Days of Cookies each Christmas and everything in between. I try to add a bit of history to my content and blend my love of teaching with it too. I’m thrilled of where Our City Homestead is going and am excited to share it with you.
Thank you so much for your support of Our City Homestead — it means the world to us! Every post you read, comment you make, pin you share, video you watch, subscribing to our channels — everything you do helps us share what we love! THANK YOU!
Grab a cup of tea or glass of homemade juice or even a mug of coffee and let’s cheers to many more years of Our City Homestead!
You can read all about why we started Our City Homestead here.
You can read all about what I learned as a blogger here.
enjoy from Our City Homestead to yours