That's a great idea!.Sadly I can't be part of it as I live in France, actually I've never really figured out why we can't be in the contests but anyway wish everyone the best of luck if you get one going! As you write, homesteading covers a lot of ground including also preserving, drying, smoking and curing food, weaving, spinning, growing plants for cosmetics and medicinal purposes etc.,. etc.,

Hi,

Thanks for taking time out to reply.

I put 'chicken' 'homesteading', 'organic gardening' , 'permaculture' 'allotments', 'farming' and 'livestock' in search and got 10 pages each and they didn't look like repeats, so there are already 70 pages which could all go under 'homesteading/smallholding" the first is the American term and the second English. This a growing movement worldwide with everyday more people keeping animals and growing their own food. If you create a category for it, it will grow, trust me.

Best Wishes Pavlovafowl aka Sue

Farming to me is a much larger scale enterprise and one which usually involves a business, whereas homesteading tends to be about self-sufficiency and providing food/energy/domestic equipment for a home. Of course now some people are doing this as a community and swapping and bartering but I still sort of tend towards thinking of farming as a more commercial profession. That's just me however, I come from a farming background we had 3000 chickens and I've got 50!

Thanks for getting back on this. I think of homesteading not to do with acreage, which I would count more as farming but with the back-to-the-land, sustainable, self-sufficient people who are doing this in their back garden. We only have 1000 sq metres of garden but we have grown it as a food forest, incorporating poultry and thus we are self-sufficient in fruit, veg and eggs. You will see people on the web who have permaculture, duckponic, aquaponic systems which work in gardens because they respect crop rotations, use companion plants, three sisters, mulch, compost, harvest rainwater and have their poultry free-ranging in with the plants. With the question of nomenclature I just pointed out the two different names because I didn't know if you were aware of them but as this is an America-based site I would expect them to use homesteading. 'Home farming' is already a term associated with homesteading so your term 'Home agriculture' could work, it's just people seem to know of homesteading as a concept. I'm just throwing a few ideas around and am glad to get some feed back. Thanks again for coming up with some suggestions.

Thanks for that, much appreciated!

Thanks for replying. I think homesteading would cover a lot that gardening and pets don't really do at the moment but where we normally have to post our instructables.

Thanks! In the background are our dry toilet and compost bin combo, which would also be covered by homesteading! Front and centre are our Chamois Polish crested, Rufus, Garbo and Marlene, Ardenner Polly, who raised my quail and Black Lucky, who is a Sebrigh/Polish cross.