On or around May 1, 2026, we’re packing up the trailer and moving onto a working farm for six months. Here’s how we got here, and why.

The dream of homesteading has always been a matter of when for us, not if. This May, the “when” finally arrives. We’re packing up our trailer and moving onto a working farm for six months of off-grid living, hands-on homesteading, and what feels like a real chance to test the waters of the life we’ve been saving toward for years.

It’s not our first rodeo, but it is our biggest step yet.

From City Apartment to Working Farm

We’ve always described ourselves as country mice. We’ve spent the last several years in the city, working demanding day jobs, keeping an affordable apartment, and quietly teaching ourselves the skills of a life we don’t yet have the land for. Container gardening on windowsills. An Aerogarden in the kitchen. A scrappy little setup we affectionately called the Solo Cup Farm. Last summer, we took a five-month stint at a trailer park as a kind of dry run, testing what it felt like to live smaller and closer to the ground.

The farmstay is our next chapter. We first connected through the WWOOF.net community, a global network that matches volunteers with organic farms, though the arrangement itself is one we’ve worked out directly with the owners. WWOOF placements are typically shorter and more seasonal, and what we were looking for, and what they ultimately wanted too, was something longer and more committed. So we’ve negotiated a six-month stay on our own terms, outside the platform, because it fits both sides better. We’ll live in our own trailer on the property and trade labor for the spot.

The owners were originally looking for short-term summer help. We countered with a six-month proposal, and the conversation that followed reshaped the season for everyone involved. On the strength of our commitment, they decided to bring Berkshire pigs onto the property instead of the Kune Kunes they’d initially considered. Building the pens and helping manage the animals will now be part of our daily work, alongside gardening, planting, harvesting, and the ordinary rhythms of running a homestead.

The property itself has us genuinely excited. The farm is still within commuting distance to our day jobs, which makes the whole thing possible, and there are five acres of forest at the back that we can’t wait to explore.

Why Not Just Rent in the Country?

The obvious question, why not simply move to a rural rental, has an answer rooted in strategy rather than sentiment. We’ve been deliberate about stretching our savings toward a down payment on land of our own, and paying someone else’s mortgage in the countryside doesn’t move us any closer to that goal. The farmstay lets us live half the year outside the city without rent, keep our modest apartment as a winter base, and bank the difference.

It also buys us something money usually can’t: real experience. Building fences, raising pigs, managing a garden at scale, and living off-grid aren’t skills that transfer cleanly from YouTube tutorials. We’ve been open about the fact that this season is partly an audition for our future selves, a chance to find out what we actually love, what we underestimated, and what we’d do differently on our own property someday.

The Preparations

The run-up has been a study in wind-downs and hand-offs. In March, we harvested or composted what remained of our indoor garden, cleaned and stored the Aerogarden, and shifted into what we’ve been calling summer garden mode. The 43 houseplants that fill the apartment are going to Connie’s mom for the season, a change from previous years, since the farm isn’t on a convenient route for plant visits this time around. By mid-April, we were counting down publicly: two weeks, then two weeks and two days, weather and mud permitting.

A Quiet Kind of Ambition

What we hope lands about this story is less the drama of the move than the patience behind it. We’re not fleeing the city or romanticizing a lifestyle we haven’t tried. We’re testing, saving, learning, and documenting: the wins and the mistakes, the simple meals and the muddy boots, with a steadiness that feels less like reinvention and more like a plan coming into focus.

If you’ve wondered what a low-key, practical path toward homesteading actually looks like, we’d love for you to follow along over the next six months at healthyish.ca. And if you’re curious enough to try something similar, WWOOF is a great place to start the conversation, and Harvest Hosts opens up a whole other side of farm travel and overnight stays. Both quietly connect thousands of would-be farmers and travelers with host properties around the world every year.