Cedar Swamp Homestead

Cedar Swamp Homestead is a family-owned farm that sits adjacent to the Nelson Swamp Unique Area in the Town of Nelson, NY. We sell farm-fresh vegetables and duck eggs at our roadside stand. On our website and blog, you can order duck eggs and vegetables for pickup at the farm, access recipes for meals made from scratch, discover gardening tips, and take a journey with us as we learn more about healthy, sustainable living and homesteading every day.

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Cedar Swamp Homestead Blog

How do you live a healthy, happy, and sustainable lifestyle in such an unhealthy world?

Do you have a nagging feeling that the modern world we live in is increasingly “wrong” for our bodies, minds, and relationships? I know I’ve struggled with this feeling most of my adult life. There is a tension or mismatch between the expectations of our modern culture and many of our physical, emotional, and social needs, and it shows up in thousands of ways.

• Hate your gray office cubicle to the point of depression?
• Been to a physical therapist to correct the damage from sitting in an office chair for 8 hours every day?
• Struggling with digestive problems and other physical ailments that doctors can’t seem to help you with?

This is just a shortlist of the now obvious signs of the mismatch that I’ve been met with, and I’m willing to bet you have a list of your own. So, how can we better align our lifestyles with our very real human needs? How do we live a healthy, happy, sustainable lifestyle in such a hostile, unhealthy world? That is the central question that I am seeking to answer for myself and hopefully others through this blog.

“Wait!” you’re saying. “I thought this was a homesteading blog.” It is. My dive into homesteading topics was and still is a lens through which I try to tackle the question of how to live a happy, healthy life. I was drawn to homesteading, as I think many in the homesteading community are, as a counter-culture act – a way of pushing back on the modern world that I was clearly struggling in like a fish out of water.

Homesteading counteracts many of the negative outcomes of unhealthy modern expectations, but it’s not a panacea, and you can easily slip into unhealthy practices while homesteading if you don’t seek out a deeper understanding of what it means to be happy and healthy. You can, for instance, seek out healthy movement and exercise through gardening and still break your body because you don’t stretch properly (Hello, plantar fasciitis and lower back pain!) You can grow all the fruits and vegetables you want without pesticides and raise your grass-fed beef responsibly but still overtax your body by overeating because you’re stressed.

This blog is for those who want to not just homestead, but to homestead for health.

If I could, I would feed and nurture the whole world so that none were sick and all were whole. This is how I do my part in my own backyard.