Author: The GingersnapHomestead

Hi! I moved to a tiny rural town in NH back in Sept 2023, and since have dove in head first to all things self sustainable It all began with 1 little jar of sourdough starter which quickly grew into a passion for homegrown food and from scratch cooking. Then, my husband's grandmother gifted me an old sewing machine for Christmas last year which I had absolutely no idea how to use. I'm teaching myself to sew one project & tik tok tutorial at a time. My husband and I are in the process of searching for a perfect house that we'll slowly but surely turn into our homestead with a side of the road farm stand. Come along for the ride!

How did I end up behind a sewing machine?

I wish I could give you some sweet anecdotal story of how I found sewing. It’s because I was anxious and have adhd. That’s it.

If you have anxiety you know how easy it is to doom scroll on your phone. If you have ADHD you know how easy it to hyper fixate on a new hobby. Put ’em together and you have how I found sewing.

I was doom scrolling tik tok and saw the cottage core and homestead girlies making quilts and decorations for their houses and decided this would be my new personality trait.

I asked my husband’s grandmother for advice since she’s an avid fiber arts crafter. She pulled out an old, cheap beginner sewing machine she’d bought as a back up and rarely used, and told me I could have it if I wanted. I brought it home and tried to use it the very first day which ended in tears. I thought surely I couldn’t be the problem, it was probably just the machine so I dragged my husband in to the car and off to Joanne’s craft store we went. I came home with a new sewing machine and more fabric and tools than I knew what to do with. By the end of the night I had figured out how to sew a slightly curved straight line. By the end of the weekend, a shitty bookmark. By the end of the week, a decent-ish bookmark. Then I put it away and it sat untouched for almost a year.

Fast forward to October 2024 and my therapist is lecturing me that I need to find a hobby. I recently started anxiety/adhd meds and didn’t know what to do with all of my free time now that I wasn’t spending 5 hours a day panicking and rage cleaning. Supposedly a hobby would keep my hands and mind busy which would prevent me from having my daily existential crisis about not knowing who I am now without my anxiety. Ok, Kevin, whatever you say. (Spoiler alert: he’s right, I’m annoyed about it.)

November 2024 I got the brilliant idea to sew everyone’s Christmas presents this year, even though I had barely sewed two scraps together the year prior. But, as with anything, there’s no stopping a girl on anxiety/adhd meds with a half baked plan and a stubborn attitude. So, here we are.

How did I end up down the self sustainable low tox rabbit hole?

Hormones, autoimmune disorders and vitamin deficiencies.

I spent years crying to my doctors that I didn’t feel good and something was wrong, just to be told time and time again it was hormones from my birth control and that nothing was wrong.

In October 2023, just weeks after we moved to NH, I got my IUD taken out. The moment it came out I felt such a sense of relief and calm. In the coming few weeks I noticed a lot of the symptoms that made me so miserable were going away. My skin cleared up immediately, I was less fatigued all the time and my anxiety went from level 100 to a reasonable level 10. The brain fog was lifting and I realized that my birth control had me feeling like a zombie for 3 years. The no more hormonal birth control to sourdough to raising chickens & not trusting the government pipeline is SO real.

In reading how to balance my hormones after coming of BC, I found the sourdough community. I loved baking, I loved sourdough bread, I need a healthy gut microbiome. So then I made this tiny little jar of flour and water that I fed, carried around the house with me while I worked and tended to night and day. I was in so deep. T

Have you read about how much plastic leeches in to our food from tupperware containers, plastic cookware or cutting boards? No? You should. That was my next rabbit hole.

Then in January 2024 I got diagnosed with an auto immune disorder and spinal disc degeneration disorder, raging high blood pressure and 2 major vitamin deficiencies. This all happened in a span of 4 hours. I was shook to my core and decided I had no desire to let big pharma become a controlling entity in my life (LOL at the fact that I work for in pharmaceutical software supporting their clinical trials which I firmly believe in. Just, hands off my body, ya know?). I got on blood pressure meds and a vitamin D supplement sure, because those are vitally important to get under control and back to normal levels. But I declined immune therapy and wanted to treat my inflammation with food as medicine and natural remedies. And down the rabbit hole of seed oils, preservatives and food dyes we went.

Now, I’m on a mission to grow and make as much from scratch as possible which allows for self sustainability as we try to build a homestead.

How we got here … moving to NH

When I met my now husband he lived in a 3 bedroom house in the suburbs of Boston with two of his college friends, even though he was pushing 30. Eventually, one roommate moved out & I moved in. Living with two boys sounds fun, I promise you as the person who cleaned the bathrooms, it was not.

I had worked as a nanny for almost 10 years and thought for sure that would be my career until we were ready to have kids of our own. I knew when that happened that I would quit and stay home to raise them; spending every day barefoot in the yard, hopping between the park or story time, and squishing their chunky little faces. I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d quit nannying before then. But life comes at you hard and fast sometimes and the career I’d spent a decade of my life building no longer brought me joy. I was burnt out and felt like I spent so much time making sure other people’s lives and homes ran smoothly that I never had time for my own. Throw in a traumatic life event or two and some crippling anxiety, and I quit my entire career without a back up plan. I had no idea what I was going to do now but I knew that I had to figure it out.

I landed on my feet, as you usually do when you take a leap of faith, and got a job working from home in global Support for a pharmaceutical software company that specializes in randomization and supply management for clinical trials. Did I know anything about software or clinical trials? Absolutely not. Had I ever worked a corporate job before? Definitely not. How I convinced my boss to hire me is still something I don’t understand, even 3 years later.

A year passed since I got that job and then I married my best friend (gag, I know that’s such a cliche but it’s true). Our lease was going to be up in a few months and we knew we were ready to get away from the roommate phase of life. We could stay in our current house and live a totally boring suburban life as cogs in the corporate wheel, or we could move to NH for a slower paced, community based life. Spoiler alert: we went with the option that lets us see the mountains from our driveway.

We moved to NH in September 2023 and immediately felt like we belonged. My husband runs the farmer’s market here, the librarians in town know us by name, I share cookie recipes with the guy who runs the dump and we live directly in the center of town (which looks like the center of a snow globe).