Ball went from city living to beekeeping, cow raising, and soapmaking.
Cyndi Ball’s homesteading journey started more than 20 years ago in a town outside Seattle — what she calls “granola country.” After trying to buy fresh produce on a shoestring salary, she planted a kitchen garden for her family instead, giving it little thought. “We just wanted to be more self-sufficient,” she says.
But the garden got out of hand. Squash vines spanned fence to foundation, beefsteak tomatoes grew so plump they were likened to the size of a grown man’s fist, and runner beans reached heights hyperbolized in English fairy tales. “I crammed so much on that tiny lot,” Ball remembers with humor.
By now, she is a nationally known homesteader, beekeeper, and agricultural educator who runs the seven-acre Lazy B Farms in north Georgia. Ball is also president and founder of the National Ladies Homestead Gathering, a nonprofit that walks women through backyard agronomy and animal husbandry with an “atta girl” mentality. Established in 2011, the organization boasts several dozen chapters from Oregon to Maine, and the memberships keep rolling in.
Ball says women are hard-pressed to find mentorship and camaraderie in the male-dominated world of agriculture. “When I came to Georgia in 2002, I called several ag-extension offices about raising beef, and, in so many words, they said I was going to fail,” she notes. “Finally, after six years, I met a gal who had cows. I was thrilled. She taught me about feed and how to fix my fences.”
Today, with her children grown and on their own, Ball is more of a bridge builder than a fence mender. Her packed calendar includes upcoming seminars at Asheville’s Mother Earth News Fair — “Simplify Your Homestead Plan” and “Women Who Homestead: The Need for Community” — intended to connect female homesteaders with others like them, affording opportunities for learning. Though Ball guides conversation during these events, her audience is just as important, sharing their trade secrets and past blunders. “It’s mostly mistakes we talk about,” admits Ball, who presented at last year’s touring conference. Sponsored by Mother Earth News, the nation’s longest-running publication about self-sufficient lifestyles, the fair brings like-minded folks together, including the particularly determined NLHG participants.
There’s not a typical chapter member, she says. “Homesteading today is not determined by acreage, lineage, or age. It’s about having an ‘I can’ attitude, and we have a lot of it.”
NLHG’s success is important, and not just because the woman-centered nonprofit speaks on modern gender issues. Rather, increased interested in self-sufficiency proves that homesteading is becoming more mainstream. Unless the topic is fresh vegetables, there’s nothing “crunchy” about it anymore.
The Mother Earth News Fair runs Saturday, April 28 and Sunday, April 29 at the Western North Carolina Agricultural Center (1301 Fanning Bridge Road, Fletcher). To buy tickets and for more information, see motherearthnewsfair.com.