Each year, Homestead Heritage holds their annual open house on Thanksgiving weekend.  This is the second year that Molly and I have attended and I’m already looking forward to next year.  I really geek out on old-school homesteading and farming.  Homestead Heritage is an agrarian and craft based intentional Christian community just outside of Waco where several families live on 550 acres right alongside the Brazos River.  They raise most of their own food and sell handmade crafts produced by the community.  They also hold classes throughout the year teaching traditional methods of spinning, weaving, cheesemaking, blacksmithing, woodworking, etc.    

 

One of these days I’m going to find time to attend their workshops, but in the meantime I can scratch the itch by attending their annual fair.  This year we attended demonstrations on soap making, cheese making, forging a knife, and throwing pottery.  We also took a tour of their farm and came home with a few pounds of hand crafted cheese made with raw milk right from the farm.  The fair is a 3 day event, but we were only able to attend on Friday.  I could easily spend 3 days there, but then we wouldn’t be able to see your smiling faces at the market.

 

 

In addition to their in-person courses, they have dozens of free video courses and a lot of reference material on their website.  They also publish their own books and put kits together so you can get off to a good start.

 

As we have lots of pig fat, I’m adding “soap making” to my projects list for 2023.  I also want to try my hand at cheese making - they made it look so easy and taste so good.  Toward that end, we stopped by Richardson Dairy in Rockdale on the way home from the fair and picked up a gallon of raw cow's milk.  Unlikely that this milk will find its way into cheese as I have a slew of projects already on my plate, but raw milk is yummy in its own right so this won’t be our last trip to the dairy (it’s only 30 minutes from the house).