Welcome to Solitude Gardens at Rockstedding. This is what the Rockstedding looked like March 18, 2022. Our first day on the newly purchased property.
My name is Matrim, nice to meet you. Stay a while and listen...
You may be asking yourself...okay Matrim, so what the heck is a rockstedding? The answer to that question is...a word I made up. It is a portmanteau of 'rock' and 'stedding.' As you will come to learn, we have many rocks here on the property. Additionally, the property is our new homestead. But why 'stedding' and not just 'homestead...?'
When we moved to the Rockstedding, I had been researching, planning, and dreaming of living on a rural homestead for five years. Most of my favorite YouTube channels, books, blogs, and podcasts involved folks and their homestead projects. While dreaming of my homestead, I was also thinking of a name for it. But I wanted the name to be a little bit different than all of the other homesteads I encountered.
The word 'homestead,' as defined in a dictionary, was too generic for my future name. So next on the list was farmstead. Nice enough, but that was too specific for me. What if I never became a farm? Then I thought 'gardenstead' would be great. A nice compromise between homestead and farmstead. And for years I planned to call my property a gardenstead...
Until, over the course of two years, I read The Wheel of Time series (WoT) by Robert Jordan. And yes, I read all fourteen books with 4,410,036 words.
In the WoT, a stedding is the home of the Ogier, a mythical species, and is a wooded space. As you will also come to learn, we have lots of trees on the new property. I was going to call my new place the Stedding because of my experience with the WoT and the word's resemblance of 'homestead.'
You may have also noticed that I previously used the term 'we.' I liked Stedding, others not so much. The name 'Solitude Gardens at Rockstedding' was collaboratively coined for our property.
Welcome to our new home. Hope you join us on the journey.
Side note for all the WoT nerds. Given all the sand on the property, I also toyed with the idea of naming the place something like the 'Three-Fold Land.' But that inferred barren desert, something our place is not.