I Want to Start Homesteading but Can’t Start I Stayed Stuck for Months

I want to start homesteading but can't start. I know that because I am standing in my backyard right now holding a shovel and I have been standing here for ten minutes maybe longer and I am not doing anything with it. The dirt is right there. The raised bed kit is right there in the box from Home Depot. I opened it yesterday. I looked at the instructions. I put it down. Now I am holding this shovel and I am just looking at the patch of grass I picked out last month and I am not moving.

This happens a lot.

I watched three homesteading videos this morning. One was about composting. One was about raised beds. One was some guy in Idaho who built a greenhouse out of old windows. I saved all of them to a playlist I have called "Start This Weekend" which is a joke because I have had that playlist for eight months and I have not started any weekend. I keep telling my wife I will start this weekend. She does not say anything anymore. She just nods. That is worse.

Last week I spent forty-five minutes trying to decide where to put the compost bin. Forty-five minutes. I walked around the yard like I was surveying land for a highway. I measured with my foot. I looked at where the sun hits at different times. I googled "best place for compost bin" and read three articles and then I got hungry and went inside and did not decide anything. The compost bin is still in the garage. I walked past it this morning and pretended not to see it. I already wrote about how I kept getting stuck in that same loop here:

That article was me admitting I bought four homesteading books and read half of one and the rest are sitting on my nightstand making me feel guilty every night. I thought books would fix it. I thought if I just learned enough I would feel ready. I do not feel ready. I feel the opposite of ready. I feel like I know too much and done too little and the gap between those two things is making me tired.

It is not lack of information anymore. I need to say that out loud or at least type it like I am saying it out loud. It is not lack of information. I know how to build a raised bed. I know what seeds to plant in my zone. I know about compost ratios and companion planting and I know that tomatoes do not like being next to potatoes. I know all this stuff and I have not planted one tomato. I have not planted one potato. I have a notebook full of notes and a phone full of saved posts and a head full of facts and my hands have not touched dirt in any real way.

I keep delaying. That is the truth. I keep finding reasons. The weather is not right. I need to research more. I need to wait for payday. I need to clear that corner first. I need to figure out the water situation. I need to watch one more video about soil testing. It is always something and the something is always small enough to sound reasonable and big enough to stop me completely.

Learning became an excuse. That is the part that stings. I tell myself I am preparing. I am not preparing. I am hiding. I am hiding behind information because information feels like action but it is not action. Reading about composting is not composting. Watching a guy build a greenhouse is not building anything. Saving ideas to a playlist is not an idea. It is a lie I tell myself so I can feel like I did something today when I did nothing.

I got tired of thinking. That is what happened last Tuesday. I was standing in the garage looking at that compost bin again and I realized I was about to google something else about compost bins. I was about to open my phone and find one more article about placement or ratios or brown versus green and my thumb was already on the screen and I just stopped. I got tired. Not sleepy tired. The other kind. The tired where you are sick of your own voice in your head going in circles.

I wanted something that removes guessing. I wanted something that tells me exactly what to do next because my brain was done deciding. Every decision felt like a wall. Put the bed here or there. Buy this seed or that seed. Start big or start small. Every choice became a reason to wait.

I found this thing. I was not looking for it. I was just tired and clicking around and I landed on a review of a system that lays out a whole backyard setup step by step. No theory. No "here are forty options pick one." Just do this then this then this. I did not trust it at first because I do not trust anything that promises to make things simple. But I was too tired to keep researching so I read the review. Here is the review if you are in that same spot:

They call it a step-by-step backyard setup. That is what got me. Not the words "self-sufficient" or "backyard transformation" or any of that. Just the fact that someone already made the decisions I was stuck on. Someone already figured out what goes where and in what order and how big and how much. I did not buy it because I was excited. I bought it because I was exhausted.

I did not read the whole thing at first. I skimmed it. I found the first step and it was stupid small. It was literally just marking out a four by four foot square in the yard with string and stakes. That was it. That was step one. I already had string. I already had stakes from a camping tent I never use. I did not need to research anything. I did not need to watch a video. I just went outside and did it.

It looked bad. The string was crooked. One stake was leaning. The square was not really square if you measured it. I did not care. I stood there looking at this lopsided rectangle in my grass and I felt something I had not felt in months. I felt like I started. Not finished. Not even close to finished. But started. There is a difference and you know it if you have been where I am.

The next day I put down cardboard over the grass inside the square. Just cardboard from boxes I had in the garage. I did not cut it perfect. I laid it down and put rocks on the corners so it would not blow away. That was it. Two days of doing tiny wrong things and I had more actual progress than six months of watching videos.

I still do not know everything. I still do not know if my soil is good. I still do not know if I am watering too much or too little. I still have not built the raised bed yet. It is still in the box. But I stopped standing in the backyard holding a shovel and doing nothing. Now I am holding the shovel because I am about to dig. That is different. That is small and messy and unsure but it is moving.

You still do not know everything. But you finally stopped standing still.