Homestead Gift Guide 2022: DIY, Home & Garden Gift Ideas

It’s that time of year again! In addition to blessing friends and family with your love and company, please enjoy this round-up of unique and useful homestead gift ideas. All of the items on the list are things we truly love and use around our home and garden, and pretty much all from small businesses too (yes, even those on Amazon 😊).

From homemade treats and crafts to puzzles, organic bedding, and personal weather stations, there is something on the list for every budget or special someone in your life! To make browsing a breeze, I broke up this homestead gift guide into five sections:

1. Past Homestead Gift Favorites
2. Handmade Gifts and Crafts 
3. Garden Goods and Gadgets
4. Kitchen Supplies
5. Natural Health and Home

To shop this article, please use the links and buttons provided throughout. Some are affiliate links, meaning we gain a small commission from purchases made through those links, but at no additional cost to you. Using our links directly supports our small business, and is a very meaningful way to say thank you if you value the work we do here at Homestead and Chill. And for that, we are so incredibly grateful!

Past Homestead Gift Favorites

Since this is my fourth year publishing a holiday gift guide, and in an effort to keep things fresh and interesting, I tried to include mostly new ideas on this year’s list. YET I don’t want y’all to miss out on any awesome ideas, so here is a quick list of some tried-and-true favorite garden gifts from year’s past. Feel free to explore our gift guides from 2019, 2020, and 2021 to see more details about these – and more!

• Seed storage boxes. Photo boxes make the BEST seed storage and organization system ever! They make my little Type A heart sing. We’ve had these durable USA-made seed storage boxes for almost 5 years and they’re still in pristine condition.
  
  
• Hummingbird feeder. Attract hummingbirds and add flair to your garden with a cute hummingbird feeder, and then learn how to make DIY nectar here.
  
  
• Books. One of the best things about gardening and homesteading is that there is ALWAYS something new to learn. Browse a list of our top garden, cooking, preserving and homesteading books here. There are some fantastic resources on this list!
  
  
• Solar garden lights. Adding solar lights to your garden and outdoor space creates a cozy, magical ambiance. It also makes it more inviting to spend time in the garden once the sun goes down. We use a combination of flickering solar tiki torches, string fairy lights, pretty pathway lights, and overhead bistro lights to brighten our space.
  
  
• Birdies raised garden beds. If you’re in the market for raised garden beds (and aren’t up for building your own), I highly recommend Birdies metal raised bed kits. They come in a variety of sizes, colors, and shapes. My friend Kevin at Epic Gardening sells them here – discount code “deannacat3” will save 5% off!

Handmade Gifts & Crafts

Edible Gifts

Who doesn’t love homemade treats, especially around the holidays? Consider whipping up some tasty edible creations as gifts for family, friends, neighbors and coworkers. Package them up in cute sustainable wrapping like mason jars, small paper bags, fabric, or other containers tied with twine. Tuck in a sprig of rosemary, pine, or lavender to the package for a festive pop, or combine several homemade treats alongside a local bottle of wine, balsamic vinegar, chocolate or olives in a cute basket.

A few homemade edible gift ideas include: sweet and salty rosemary roasted mixed nuts, homemade chex mix, fruit preserves, sourdough crackers with herbs or cheese, sourdough pumpkin spice bread (or muffins), or cookies – like our soft and chewy ginger molasses sourdough cookies or sourdough chocolate chip cookies. You could even bake pumpkin-shaped sourdough bread to give to someone special! 

Elderberry Syrup

We love to share our homemade elderberry syrup – a delicious natural immune support that can help prevent illness as well relieve allergy and cold symptoms. It’s perfect for winter time, and a little goes a long way! Learn how to make your own here.

My friend Sarah owns TC Elderberry and sells dry DIY elderberry syrup kits, which are especially easy to make or gift, and would be perfect to pair with a bottle of local honey! Sarah also offers loose-leaf elderberry tea, tinctures, and bottles of fresh organic elderberry syrup. I personally love the “Kicked Up” version! Use code “deannacat” to save 15% at TC Elderberry here.

Homemade Body Care Products

Give the gift of self care! Homemade body care products are incredibly thoughtful and useful gifts, and are easier to make than you may think. Check out our step-by-step tutorials on how to make healing calendula salve, calming lavender salve, soothing cannabis salve, homemade lip balm, or herb-infused face or body oil. Bonus: just one batch can create dozens of gifts at once! 

Homemade soap, bath bombs, sugar body scrubs, or DIY bath salts are other fun self-care gift ideas. We also offer luxurious herb and flower-infused mineral bath salts in our shop. Use code “thankyou” to save $5 when you buy 3 bath salts or more!

Crafty DIY Gifts

I love crafting… just writing this makes me want to start a craft project! Pinterest is always full of fun ideas I want to try, like these handmade bird houses. If you like to sew, don’t miss our DIY heating pad or cold pack tutorial. Making fruit and vegetable stamped tea towels is a fun activity for the whole family. If you have backyard chickens, these blown egg ornaments are totally adorable. Or, learn how to make DIY beeswax wraps here (sustainable/reusable food wraps). 

Puzzles

So this isn’t exactly a craft, but similar! I’ve been SO into puzzles this year – especially ones with plants or gardens, birds, farms, cats, or other beautiful natural scenes. I enjoy the challenge, pretty photos, and opportunity to clear my mind and focus on one task. When I’m finished with them, I either pass them on to friends or followers on Instagram, or donate them to local senior centers. I’ve used this puzzle saver backing to keep and frame one of the best ones too!

Homestead and Chill Goods

I can’t share a gift guide without highlighting all the goodies we offer in our shop, right? And we’d be SO grateful if you considered supporting our small business during this holiday season! As a special thank you, please use code “SHOPSMALL” to enjoy 10% off – now through Monday Nov 28th at midnight. To give back, we also donate a portion of all proceeds to rotating wildlife, social justice, and environmental nonprofits each year.

One of our most popular items is our organic sourdough starter. It’s a little piece of our personal starter, comes dehydrated (perfect for gifting!) and with easy instructions to reactivate it  – success guaranteed! 

Using homegrown, fair-trade and high-quality organic ingredients, we also make a wide variety of natural body care products, including healing salves and lip balms, luxurious herb and mineral bath salts, natural insect repellent, soothing aftershave or beard balm, kid-safe “breathe easy” balm, and more. 

New this season: I rounded up some of my favorite photos and created a beautiful 8-pack of pollinator greeting cards (printed on recycled paper) as well as a 2023 nature wall calendar. Last but not least, we also offer Homestead and Chill t-shirts and canvas tote bags printed on organic cotton, hemp, bamboo, and other sustainable materials! 

Garden Goods & Gadgets

Seeds or Plants

While it may not be the best idea to pick out specific varieties for someone else, I know us gardeners always get excited about seeds – and plant shopping! So perhaps consider giving the special gardener in your life a gift certificate to their favorite local nursery or seed supplier so they can pick out exactly what they need. Tuck the gift card inside a garden hod or harvest basket (I always find the best ones at thrift stores!) and a new pair of garden gloves to round out the gift.

For seeds, I highly recommend High Mowing Organic Seeds. They’re an awesome small business based out of Vermont, and offer a stellar selection of certified organic veggie, flower and herb seeds. 95% of what we grow in our garden comes from High Mowing!

Personal Weather Station

Monitoring the weather is crucial for us gardeners, and can be really fun too! We’ve found that our local weather forecasts always seem several degrees off from what we truly experience in our garden, so this year we invested in a personal weather station! Now we can monitor the real-time temperature, humidity, wind, rain, UV, and pressure in our backyard microclimate. This is especially key when it comes to frost and deciding when to act and cover our most tender plants. 

We just recently got our weather station so we admittedly haven’t had a lot of time to test it out yet. But so far, so good! I chose it based on the reputable brand (a small business!), rave reviews, features, versatile mounting options, and range. Set-up was a breeze, and I’ve heard from dozens of folks in my Instagram community who say they’ve had the same one for years and love it!

Merry People Boots

Whether we’re out here harvesting, weeding, or just kicking back in the garden, you can pretty much always catch us in our Merry People boots. They’ve been our favorite garden boots since we first discovered them a few years ago; I wear mine pretty much every day. Merry People boots are comfortable, sturdy, vegan, waterproof, unisex, and come in a TON of fun color combinations! They offer tall boots and short clogs too. I’m also very happy to support a great small company that was founded by a woman of color. 

Wildlife Trail Camera

Here’s another new fun toy we got this year: a wildlife camera! After a lot of research (and trying a not-so-great trail cam first) we settled on a Bushnell trail cam. Admittedly, I have mostly used it to spy on the baby quail we had on our property this summer (squee!) but it’s a great tool to have around to identify garden visitors – especially those that come out at night. When you’re experiencing damage to your crops, it’s essential to identify the culprit before deciding how to best proceed! I’ve also spotted coyotes and raccoons on ours.

LED Grow Light Shelf

Here’s a gift idea for the serious seed-starter. We’ve been growing food from seed for many, many years now, but our seedlings have NEVER looked so healthy or grown as quickly as they have since we got this LED grow light shelf from Gardener’s Supply. In fact, we now have two! We’ve even decided we probably won’t add a greenhouse to our new homestead. The light shelves simply work too well, and raising seedlings indoors (or in this case, in our barn/shed) is actually easier than fighting the temperature swings that go hand-in-hand with greenhouses. 

Gardener’s Supply is currently offering free shipping on orders over $150 with code “HOLIDAYS22”

A Drone

Okay, it may be a bit of a stretch to call this a “garden tool”… but I love capturing our garden space with our new drone! It’s going to be so fun to document changes and progress on the property over time. When I was shopping and comparing drones, I chose the DJI Mini 3 Pro for several reasons. It is lightweight and compact, easy to fly, has absolutely stellar photo and video quality, and the biggest selling point (for me): it’s ability to shoot in portrait mode, with an easy toggle back to landscape too. Almost all other drones only shoot in landscape, which isn’t ideal for sharing on social media like I do so much!

Kitchen Supplies

Ceramic egg holder 

Anyone can enjoy this stylish little egg holder, but it’s an especially perfect gift for the backyard chicken keeper in your life. We keep ours out on the counter to display our girls’ beautiful (unwashed) eggs, though it works just fine on a refrigerator shelf too! (If you’re curious about storing fresh eggs at room temperature, please see this article.)

Sourdough Baking Kit 

Here is a super cute homestead gift idea: a sourdough baking kit, complete with a bread proofing basket (aka, a banneton) and a few smaller supplies tucked inside like a dough scraper, bread lame, and sourdough starter. A cast iron combo cooker (what we bake our sourdough bread in, like an upside down dutch oven) would be another fun addition! 

Our organic sourdough starter comes dehydrated (but alive), is easily reactivated with just a little flour and water, but doesn’t have to be activated for up to a year – so there is no pressure for the recipient to do anything with it right away.

Baking fresh sourdough bread is incredibly fun, rewarding, reduces wasteful packaging, is more nutritious and easier to digest than regular bread. Plus, it’s not difficult to do! All you need is a few basic supplies, a sourdough starter culture, and the desire to learn. We’re here to help with plenty of start-to-finish tutorials and recipes.

Loose Leaf Tea Party

Does someone in your life love to drink tea? Consider putting together a cute little tea party set! I adore our loose-leaf glass teapot for two, or use this high-quality stainless infuser for a single mug. Then pop over to Farmhouse Tea to browse their absolutely delectable tea blends like Coastal Cranberry Spice, Cherry Country Chai, Apple Cider Fixin’s, Prudent Pumpkin Spice, Gingerbread Spice, and Cottage Peach Roobis… just to name a few! Some contain caffeine, though most are non-caffeinated.

Farmhouse Teas is a small family-run business from Oregon, where they source all of their ingredients locally and/or organic. Their “trial size” packs are a wonderful budget-friendly gift, and still contain up to 12 cups of tea! They also offer larger bags of loose-leaf tea, bundles with 3 small bags of choice, holiday gift sets, and more. Save 20% off on Farmhouse Teas from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday with code “FARMHOUSE20”.

Zoodler

This may seem like a silly contraption, but we are stoked to have a zoodler come zucchini season! We use it all summer long. Zoodles are a fun and different way to enjoy your zucchini bounty, and an awesome low-carb pasta substitute. They’re especially delicious with homemade tomato sauce or pesto, fresh tomatoes, and even some black beans or chickpeas added for protein. Zucchini aside, you can use it to spiralize a wide variety of veggies!

Dehydrator 

We use our food dehydrators almost non-stop year-round, drying and preserving everything from herbs and flowers to fruits and veggies. There are a lot of food dehydrators out there, but Excalibur machines are top-notch – and far superior to others we’ve used in the past! They’re efficient, fairly quiet, made in the USA, all BPA-free, and some models are available with convenient timers. 

I personally love the large capacity of the 9-tray models to fit all our goodies. When we had an old 4-tray dehydrator (different brand), we often found ourselves having to dry things in batches because it filled up too quickly. The precise temperature control is also fabulous, especially if you’re into raw foods and preserving the maximum nutrients and medicinal properties possible. 

Excalibur has a stellar Black Friday deal going on too: save 30% off site wide with code “BFCM22“!

Natural Health and Home

Organic Linens

I hate to be doom-and-gloom here… but did you know that conventional cotton is one of the most pesticide intensive crops to grow? On the other hand, choosing organic cotton bedding is better for your health, the environment, wildlife, and farmworkers alike!

We have organic cotton sheets from Boll & Branch and Avocado – they’re both wonderful! I especially love that Boll & Branch is certified fair trade. They also offer organic cotton bath towels, duvet covers, blankets, pillows and more. You could even take it a step further and invest in a non-toxic organic mattress from Avocado. We love ours!

Boll & Branch is currently having a 25% off sale with code “CYBER25”, and Avocado is offering 10% off site wide.

Air Purifier

Between dust, dander, allergens, mold, cleaning products, wood smoke and other impurities, did you know the air inside your home is often far more “polluted” than outside? And, that’s where we usually spend most of our time… breathing all that in!

Several years ago we invested in an air purifier with a HEPA filter during summer wildfires. The smoke was almost unbearable. Then I realized just how much the air purifier was helping my allergies too, so we ended up getting another – one for the bedroom, and one for the living room. Now I sleep with one on every night and feel much better about our indoor air quality!

Beeswax Candles

Speaking of indoor air quality… Consider gifting some clean-burning beeswax candles this holiday season! We quit burning traditional petroleum based candles years ago. I also avoid scented candles, even ones made from natural waxes. Those types of candles expose you to harmful chemicals, including carcinogens and endocrine disruptors. (Learn more here)

Instead, we love to burn 100% pure beeswax candles during cozy or festive occasions. The natural light honey aroma is scented enough, and if I want more aroma, I whip up a natural simmer pot instead! Tip: keep the wick trimmed short to prevent beeswax candles from smoking. (Plus I turn on the air purifier to clear the smoke once I blow them out.) 

I really like these beeswax pillars (which come in a variety of sizes) and these beeswax votives – both from small businesses and made from USA beeswax!

Natural Soaps 

This year I discovered a fantastic new natural deodorant company, Humble! My armpits have never been happier. (I especially love their sensitive skin formulas and cardboard packaging.) The small company has really stellar ethics when it comes to the environment, diversity and charitable giving. They also make cold-process natural soaps that are free of artificial fragrance, sodium lauryl sulfate or parabens. The soaps are sustainably packaged, cruelty-free, and come as single bars or mixed sets – which would make great gifts or stocking stuffers!

Body Massage Hook

Between working in the garden and the general stress of life, my shoulders are always riddled with knots. Aaron is a sweetheart and rubs my shoulders often, but sometimes his hands need a break too. That’s when this body hook massager becomes my BFF. I can reach every spot! It provides amazing relief, especially paired with CBD. You can use it all over your body, such as for acupressure on the bottom your feet. (Check out the photos in the listing.)

NuVita CBD

Last but not least, NuVita. If you’ve been around, you’ve probably heard me rave about NuVita CBD more than a time or two. This small business has truly changed my life for the better! I take their full spectrum CBD every day for anxiety, stress, muscle aches and joint pain (which comes in an oil tincture, softgels or gummies) along with their CBN tincture every night for the best sleep ever.

NuVita also offers CBD and CBN topical rollers, which are absolutely amazing for localized pain, inflammation relief, and aromatherapy – especially after a long day working in the garden!

Use code “deannacat” to save 10% on NuVita products, any time. If you like them as much I do, you can also sign up for autoship for an additional 15% off – for 25% savings total!

And that wraps up this year’s homestead gift guide.

Well friends, I hope you found some new and fun homestead gift ideas after browsing this list! We hope you have a wonderful winter holiday season ahead. I’m always extra-reflective this time of year, because exactly four years ago this week I sat down to start building this website… and what a wild ride it’s been ever since! We truly can’t thank you enough for being a part of our community and journey. Homestead and Chill wouldn’t be the same without you!