Alison Buckley’s approach to her store is about preserving a way of life. At Buckley’s Homestead Supply in Colorado Springs, she strives to connect the community with the skills and lifestyle that harken back to a different time whether it be canning, fermenting, raising chicks, or even beekeeping.
Buckley says the business is a family affair. She started the store in 2012, she says, mostly as a way to get her husband, who passed away at the end of June, out of the dairy business. “He was one of the guys that worked in the milk vault, which is very, very hard on the body … and we weren’t getting any younger. So this was a way to get him out of there,” she says. “That was the main reason for making a business out of this.”
Buckley says the start of her love of this lifestyle came from her childhood. “My grandfather had a little hobby farm in Wentzville, Missouri, and that’s where it all started. I used to spend hours in his chicken coop and he would bring in all kinds of goats and llamas and horses. It was just a magical place to be as a kid.”
A Love of the Lifestyle at Buckley’s Homestead Supply
Buckley says she always saw something new every summer when she would come up from her hometown of Panama in Southern Louisiana. Her grandfather had come from a long line of farmers so that experience stayed with her.
Once she got married and had a little place of our own, Buckley thought, “Well, I want some chickens to put a little bit of that magic in my yard for my own children.” She says her friends always told her chickens are a gateway drug to caring for other animals. “And it’s really kind of true. You start with chickens and then you start going, ‘Maybe I can do rabbits. Well, if I have rabbits, maybe I can have goats.’”
Buckley says that is where the initial spark for Homestead Supply came from. “And we thought, ‘Why not turn [this love] into a business where we can help teach others how to do the same kind of magic in their backyard, and at the same time, get Ed out of the dairy.’”
She says people were interested in their kind of store from the get-go. Buckley and her husband would go for walks around the neighborhood. She began to see more and more backyards with chickens, but there were no convenient feed stores on the west side so they were driving 20 or 25 minutes to Colorado Agri-Feed, which has since closed.
“We thought, why not try and start a little store on this side of town and help nurture all these others who want to remember these old skills. What we do is more than just feeding livestock. We try to keep other skills alive like fermentation and cheese making and other fun old things that used to just be a way of life.”
The result of these skills Buckley says cascades in a way one might not expect. “You start with raising your own animals, and then you kind of figure out cooking with cast iron is a healthier way to cook.” These processes, Buckley explains, including canning and beekeeping, lead toward a way of life that’s a little more simple. The lifestyle the store promotes she finds is a distillation of the best things in life. “The things that aren’t important tend to kind of fall away, and you’re left with the simple beauty of doing things yourself.”
Curated Selection of Products
While the selection of material at Buckley’s Homestead Supply might be smaller than some of the bigger stores, it is specifically curated with the customer in mind. “I think a lot of people initially see our small size and they come in thinking, ‘Oh, this is going to be really boutiquey and expensive.’ And while we aren’t ’boutiquey expensive’, we will always be more expensive than Big R & Tractor Supply because we just don’t have the buying power that they do.”
That said, Buckley says they try to keep their prices as low as possible but at the same time keep their doors open. “We’re not getting rich doing what we’re doing. We just want to be able to make a living doing this and help support others along the way.”
They are also starting up classes again after being curbed back during COVID. They will continue to highlight such skills as canning and fermentation, which comes with misconceptions but ones that are easily remedied through instruction and care.
Buckley says that she and members of her staff are always there to answer questions. “There has definitely been more interest in these skills. People, I think, are a little more hesitant with fermentation just because we’ve been taught our whole lives, ‘Don’t leave food out. Put it in the fridge.’ Fermentation is all about leaving things out on your counter to the kind of carefully be digested by bacteria, which is kind of against what we are taught.”
She says the fear people have with fermentation revolves around “if I leave this thing out to ferment on my counter … and if I am unfamiliar with what is going on, something bad might happen.” Buckley says people worry they are going to eat it and be sick. That is why she and her staff are there to help them through the process.
“In all truthfulness, you are more likely to make yourself sick from canning, which people are more willing to jump into.” This is because things can go wrong in canning that is not visible. “If you don’t process [for canning] for a long enough time, you won’t have the right pH.” This can cause botulism to grow, which has no smell or taste. Whereas in fermentation, if it smells bad, then don’t eat it. “It might not be bad. It just might not be your cup of tea, but in order for you to make yourself sick with some fermented vegetables, you would know.”
Imparting Knowledge as a Way of Life
Buckley loves imparting this knowledge and hopes to expand with more classes and products in the future. “We’re actually exploring several new things right now. We would like to get into equipment rentals but that comes with some tricky legal and insurance [aspects] that I’ve got to get figured out.” She says they would also like to expand into dog and cat products including some foods and treats. “We’ve had a lot of interest in that.”
While Buckley has another full-time job as an educator, coming home at the end of the day to watch her chickens scratch around or having her goats scream at her because they heard her car door close keeps her grounded.
She laughs, “They’re screaming right now. I can hear them.”
The clarity of just spending the weekend with her friend extracting honey out of her hives, “It’s just a humbling experience because you can do everything right and Mother Nature is still going to throw you a curveball. The bees might decide they want to live someplace else, or your goat has one more baby than you were expecting.”
