Hey there and welcome!

My name is Sam and I am here to inspire and encourage you to love the homesteader, gardener, home cook and dabbler lifestyle, just like me, to follow your dreams and dabble in the things you love to do!

I am a mom to 3 amazing kids who aren’t really kids anymore they are teenagers and young adults, how did that happen?!?

History of our homestead:

My ex husband Pat (My World Has Been Rocked (And not in a good way) and I grew up in a small town but we just kept moving further and further out to the country.

Our family life was humming along at a nice pace when all of a sudden it was 2008 and the big recession happened. We were living in a large log house (which needed lots of repairs!) and our kids were 6, 3.5 and 1.

My hubby and I were constantly stressed about money and the mortgage etc and not able to enjoy life and adventures with our kids.

About that time, I came across a few books about homesteading and living simply. Pat and I decided that a simpler, more homegrown and wholesome life was more the type of life we saw for ourselves and for our kids.

The kind of life where food is grown in the garden and cooked from scratch and preserved in “old-fashioned” ways, where there are chickens scratching in the yard and the laundry is hanging on the line.

It took a couple of years, but we sold the big log house, moved into a travel trailer for the summer, and proceeded to search for our “dream property”

History of our homestead:

In the fall of 2013, we moved into our current home with its 1 acre of mostly flat land (a near miracle in our part of the world!) and have slowly been turning this blank slate of a property into our little homestead.

We started with the garden, added some chickens, then some ducks, and we are always working on different homestead skills and projects.

Some of our favorites projects include learning and sharing new ways of preserving and enjoying the harvest, building fences, raising chicks, making our own home cleaning supplies, and of course, raising our 3 kids.

Kids love learning about chicks and animals on the homestead.
Chicks and kids are so cute together, don’t you think?

We love homesteading and I love anything to do with being at home.

But here’s the thing, I love to travel. I was lucky enough to live in and travel around Europe when I was younger and I still have that old pesky travel bug! My husband grew up camping and road trips and doing a lot of the same kinds of things I did, so we both enjoy taking our kids on road trips to explore our gorgeous country.

Someday soon, we hope to cross some borders and do some more international travel as well, (my bucket lists are getting pretty epic!). If you would like to see more about our travels as well as camping and road trips, you can check that out at travels.justdabblingalong.com. 

Travel content now available at travels.justdabblingalong.com

About this blog:

JDA is a place I hope to inspire you and encourage you to dabble in homesteading skills wherever you are on your homesteading journey. We will accomplish this through sharing our trials and tribulations and sharing info related to homesteading (gardening, home cooking recipes, food storage, animal husbandry, wholistic health, DIY).

So please I encourage you to come join me for a chat on Facebook, Instagram or email me anytime at sam@justdabblingalong.com!

Here are a few great articles to get us more acquainted: