Listen to internet radio with Survival Mom Radio Network on BlogTalkRadio
Recipe of the week this week is Filled Oatmeal Cookies- or survival bars.
I also have a review for a book I downloaded off of amazon that I found to be really interesting. It's the Ask Jackie series on homesteading. This is basically just a huge collection of people's real life questions followed by Jackie Clay's answers. Jackie Clay is a frequent contributor to Backwoods home magazine, if you've never heard of her. I highly recommend this easy to read and informative ebook for all of you who are interested in homesteading in any sense of the word. There are sections on getting started, finding and buying land, building, water, generator, electricity adn heat, recipes, wild game, cast iron, preparedness and whole bunch more. I was impressed, as I always am with anything I read by Jackie Clay. This was an amazon kindle download, but I don't have a kindle so I simply downloaded it to my computer using the free kindle for pc application. I think there is so much good information in this book, in such an easy to read and enjoyable format that even if you aren't new to the homesteading movement you will find something to think about, try or work on. It's inexpensive, 9.95 is the current price, and I think well worth the cost. Just a little something I read and thought some of you might be wanting to read as well.
This week I want to talk about how disappointing homesteading can be. It's easy to picture it as an idyllic lifestyle, pouring out sunshine and rainbows. Lord knows there are a ton of websites and blogs out there that never give you a glimpse into the other side- the less than perfect side. And there is one, when you are dealing with so many variables, undoubtedly something is going to go wrong. Even things you can't think can go wrong can and will. I promise you that.
I'm telling you about this because I want you to know things aren't always perfect and that it's ok. It's totally ok to feel like you aren't doing everything you should be, what you are trying isn't working and just generally feeling let down about the whole process. We all feel that way at one time or another- don't worry, it's normal.
However it happens for you, you decide that you want to start living a more self sufficient lifestyle. So, you start making changes and taking steps towards reaching some of your goals. The problem is that we often set our goals too high when we are just starting out. We want to do it all, and we want it right now. Living the homesteaders lifestyle is going to teach you to slow down and be patient whether you like it or not. It takes time to grow vegetables, to prepare them for long term preservation, to cultivate crops or animals that can be used as food. Fruit trees can take years to bear fruit, remodeling projects can take forever when you are trying to do them without going into debt. I'm not telling you this to scare you off- I'm telling you this to help you learn to make the right choices at the right time!
Let's say you start out by deciding to overhaul your eating habits. You want to eat a more traditional, whole foods diet. You buy some wheat berries and a grinder and decide to make your own bread. Some of it is going to turn out like bricks. There will be loaves of bread that you feel bad feeding to the chickens, let lone your family. It make take you some time to find a recipe that works for you and with you! Don't give up. You will get it, but it's going to take practice. Expect some failures along the way. When I first started baking whole wheat bread from freshly ground flour, I thought I would be able to snap my fingers and make a magically wonderful loaf of bread appear just because I have been baking bread all of my life. Yeah....not so much. My first loaves were dense, bitter, short, sometimes burnt and most of the time disgusting. I think bread is the first food that has ever made me cry because I couldn't get a grasp on it. After I had my pity party, I started looking things up on the internet and educating myself a bit more about whole wheat breads. I learned to use different methods of mixing, proofing and even how to sift my freshly ground flour to remove some of the bran to help me yield a tall, light and tender loaf. It took HOURS, literally hours, of my time to get the hang of it. Whole wheat flour and refined white flour are as different as night and day to bake with for me. I struggled for a long time and I felt like a huge failure before I finally started the uphill climb to success.
Canning always seems like such an easy way to preserve food right? Jams and jellies, pickles, beans, meat and more all canned up just sitting on your shelf would be such a blessing wouldn't it? I don't think canning is all that hard and I have made countless batches of jam and jelly- but this is another area where failures should be expected.....Not necessarily failures in the canning process itself, although those do happen, but failures in what you can. I canned so many pickled using a new recipe one time just to find out that my family hated the recipe. Or, the time I canning baked beans, they didn't like those either. Following a good canning book, like the ball blue book of canning, is a great place to start out. Just follow the directions and you should be fine. It's the process of finding what you need to can for your family, what they will eat and what things you don't care for canned.
When it comes to food and changing your whole diet, you can just expect things to go wrong. But food is just a small portion of homesteading woes.
Animals are another thing you may decide that you want. Nothing with animals ever goes as planned. For years now, we haven't been able to keep chickens. Something always happens to them. One year, the giant mutant raccoon that lives in the culvert across the street from us picked them off one by one. There was no coop, no fence, no locked cage that he couldn't break into for a nice juicy laying hen. He grew tremendously that summer, maybe that's a good indicator of how healthy free range organic chicken is for you? Who knows. Then there was the year that the dogs got to them, or the year that they all just mysteriously died. The whole time your going through this you think- these are just chickens-----how can I be messing it up so majorly? You learn from each experience, take what you can and try harder the next time.
Our milk cow experience was great for the first year, so we bought another cow.....the first 3 months we had here were the worst ever. We came so close to just selling her so many times. I'm glad we stuck it out, but oh my gosh- trial after trial. When we got her, she was due to calve. She went over her due date by 13 days and was really worrying us....then she calved and immediately got milk fever, which we had never seen, diagnosed or treated before. We made more mistakes with her as we tried this remedy and that one, trying to get her well again. We finally did it, and without the help of a vet which is very costly in our area for large animals, and she got well only to become a holy nightmare on 4 hooves. We didn't have the best set up from bringing her in to milk and she wasn't halter broke yet, so she kind of had to be herded into the milking parlor. She decided she hated it and wanted a different routine one day. At that point she would lead you on a merry chase around the field until you could either corner her or force her through the fence to be milked. One time, she was so terrible, my husband actually jumped on her neck like a rodeo competitor and wrestled her to the ground. Lessons were learned, things were changed and there are no more problems. She is now a great cow with a wonderful disposition but for a while she was like the spawn of Satan to deal with.
Gardening or raising crops is another place that you will find disappointment. Trying to make anything grow to a point of harvest is hard. If you are trying to use an organic method of fertilizing and pest management, it can be even more frustrating. Here's another blooper from my files- our chickens were doing great this year, about 3/4 grown, getting big. We let them start to free range in the garden because everything we had planted was full grown and we thought we would let them eat the bugs down. Well, what we learned was our garden does not have enough protein (and by that I mean bugs) to sustain 9 3/4 grown chickens. What it did have was juicy, green vegetables that they could feast on. I had this row of luscious cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower and brussels sprouts that were growing so nicely. I was excited for them to be just about ready to harvest when one day I went out and they were gone. Stripped of all produce, vegetation, flowers everything was just gone. The little buggers were searching so hard for food that they stopped looking and ate what was easy to find and that was my plants. We began feeding them a special blend of high protein feed and they have stopped. Now they are happy chickens who never leave their favorite places for very long and have completely stopped eating my vegetables. Lesson learned, although at the cost of a lot of food I was counting on preserving.
The moral of my story today is this- things can and will go wrong. Homesteading isn't easy no matter what size place you are working with. In the city, cats will knock over your plants, in the country animals will die and everywhere in between something you don't expect or plan to happen will happen. It's all part of the learning curve. It's also all part of the process of living closer to the land. Crops will fail and you will have to do without pears for the winter, or the hay crop will be short and you have to sell off animals in order to be able to feed the ones left over properly. Money and time will be short, you will always have more projects you want to do than time to do them. You list of must have will become a list of make dues.....but at the end of the day, no matter what, there is something you will have that you can't get anywhere else and that's the sense of pride. You did it, you made it through the hard time and got to the other side. There is just no other feeling like the one you get when you finally bake that loaf of bread and feed it to your happy family. It's all worth it, every last bit.
Don't be fooled into thinking things are going to be easy. Be prepared for disappointment. Take off the rose colored glasses and be a realist. It will be hard sometimes, but you can do it. I promise.
This post was the shot in the arm I needed after my weekend. This was our first year with chickens and this weekend a fox got them in a daytime attack and decimated my flock almost to nothing. I went into homesteading knowing that there would be hard times, it's not all easy and that there is an unanticipated learning curve. No matter how prepared you think you are, life throws you a curveball. Can't wait to hear the episode! :-)
ReplyDelete