“Very soon, I had courses for all parts of the year, because it is very seasonal,” Ward says. She expanded her workshop repertoire by offering things she was going to do anyways such as making chutney, marmalades and apple wine, as well as caring for bees. She never borrowed money and is now earning more than she did from her traditional job. We redid the kitchen to get ready for courses, but we wanted a new kitchen anyway.” Finding Successīy the end of the first year, Ward was financially independent.

The first year we spent a great amount of time planning. “Rather than running around and doing whatever I could possibly do, it showed me what I needed to do. “It helped me see what my competitors where, what my strengths were, what I needed to earn and how I could do that. When she wanted to go full time, her husband encouraged her to create a proper business plan, as he wasn’t quite sure that workshops would be able to contribute enough to the mortgage. And I got paid for doing it.” Getting Started They met the chickens (and) had tea and cake, and I showed them how to muck out the chickens. Ward sold me on the idea of offering chicken workshops from my homestead by putting it this way: “The people were fascinated. After the workshop, she sends the course notes digitally to attendees. Over refreshments, Ward will peruse the course notes to make sure she didn’t miss anything. CervenanskyĪt the end of the tour-and after everyone has gotten a chance to ‘hug a hen’-the workshop retreats in the conservatory, where guests are treated once again to Ward’s kitchen skills. This allows her to talk about her weekly bakery, which she follows by discussing the details of chicken keeping. She then serves mayonnaise made from her chicken’s eggs on bread that she baked. Ward starts in the garden, offering a freshly made cold drink. Hen Corner offers workshops in the evenings during the week, and up to a half dozen guests typically attended. Ward is schooling people to do just that through her many workshops. They want to mitigate their carbon footprint and make wiser food choices, but they need practical advice.

Her husband says that many are learning how people are part of the planet’s problems. Ward gets her guests to celebrate their urban homes while weaving in parts of the countryside. They ran a program of courses for chicken owners to showcase how easy it is to care for them- particularly in London where people think, ‘I can’t raise chickens.’” “Initially, we advertised through the company who made the chicken coop. Lots of television programs and magazines talk about how wonderful the country is. “A majority of people live in towns, but there is a big aspiration for country life. “Because we are doing it in London, we show people what can be done in a city,” Ward says. In addition to offering classes, Ward is a regular columnist for Country Living Magazine-one of the U.K.’s most popular lifestyle magazines. Those workshops slowly ballooned Ward’s hobby into a full-time business, where she was able to quit her job and start to homestead full time. Then a chicken coop company asked them to run a few poultry courses. “But we’ve worked out what we can grow and what we can’t.” At the HomesteadĪs they started homesteading, others became interested.

“I’ve never been able to grow a carrot that has been big enough to be peeled,” Ward says. After a bit of research, they started buying organic, because growing your own vegetables is not always easy.

Their homesteading journey began more than a decade ago when they started questioning where their family’s food was coming from. As we sat in their conservatory, where weekly homesteading workshops are held, they offered me Earl Grey tea and homemade fresh-out-of-the-oven cinnamon buns. Ward and her husband, Andy, welcomed me into their home on a stereotypical drizzly England day. Hidden at the end of a line of townhouses, Sara Ward and her family have transformed their house into an urban smallholding dubbed “ Hen Corner.” They are living the country life complete with 24 hens, 100,000 honeybees, a vegetable garden, fruit trees and micro-bakery-all on a small city lot. On an eight-hour layover while traveling abroad in England, I circumnavigated “the tube”-London’s underground public rapid transit system-to visit a chicken owner in West London.

Hobby farms chickens magazine