Hi! I’m Anna, and I’m a city girl turned modern homesteader who’s passionate about growing, cooking and preserving real food at home, creating my own herbal medicine and all-natural home and body care products, and working toward a simpler, more sustainable, more self-sufficient life each and every day. And I’m equally passionate about helping others do the same.

My husband Ryan and I first became interested in homesteading when we were still living in a condo in Vancouver. I was going through a pretty severe bout of depression and was miserable running the rat race of city life. Ryan, a talented carpenter and skilled handyman, was growing sick and tired of the grind too and had dreams of owning enough land to have a workshop and run his own business on his own terms.

We both felt trapped and were looking for a way out

Around the same time, we became obsessed with watching documentaries about our modern food and pharmaceutical industries, about corporate and political corruption, about the impact of capitalism and consumerism on our planet and our health, and about people who were opting out of this modern lifestyle and taking matters into their own hands by living more sustainable, self-sufficient lifestyles and reducing their dependence on these broken systems. Many of them referred to themselves as “homesteaders,” and with that, the seed had officially been planted.

We became enamoured with the idea of living a similar lifestyle ourselves, and before long we were making plans to move out of the city to a more rural area where we could have enough land to start growing our own food and producing as much as possible with our own two hands.

Homesteading offered us the opportunity to take back some power and control over our lives; To escape the rat race and live life on our own terms, and to become producers rather than mindless consumers who seemed to be constantly trapped in a spiral of endless debt, poor health and disillusionment with modern society.