Reflections of katlupe: homesteading skills

Showing posts with label homesteading skills. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Five Homesteading Skills That Can Save Your Life

Start gardening!

1. Gardening - number one thing is that we need food to live. Learn to garden and you will have food. Start small and you can increase your garden as your knowledge and ability increases.

Canning is a life saver!

2. Canning - Learn to can your garden produce. If there is an emergency and there is limited electric power or none, your food will be safely in your pantry in the jars you canned it in. Fast meals, needing just to be heated up or added to other foods for a casserole or soup.

Buy pet food several cans at a time to build a supply.

3. Prepping - Prepping is not a bad thing to do.........in fact, it is the ONLY thing to do. Prepare now in case you need those supplies or food you have stocked up. Do it a little bit at a time until you have a couple years worth.

Know how to repair or set up things yourself!

4. DIY (Do It Yourself) - Learn to fix or make things. Start making cleaning supplies, personal care items (like shampoo) and other items that you buy regularly. Learn to repair your vehicles, household items, shoes, etc. You never know when there will be nobody to call or no money to pay someone to fix things for you. LEARN NOW!

Use the wild plants around you! Burdock here.

5. Herbal and Alternative Medicine - I know what you are going to say! But these medicines were here long before allopathic medicines and professionals. Learn what some of them are and then discover which ones grow around your home. Prepare before you need to!

Knowledge will take you a long way! Don't be helpless!

Monday, August 22, 2011

Learn Your Homesteading Skills Slowly

We learned about alternative energy!

One of the things I have learned about modern homesteading or living a self-sufficient lifestyle is that you don't have to do it all. Do little bits at a time. Learn to do one thing before you move onto to another. Finish learning before tackling something else. I know I haven't always done that. That is why I know not to do it anymore. If you try to take on too much at once, it will seem overwhelming. You might want to give up. There are no rules, do as much as you can. Little by little. You can do it! I did.

I learned to can!

That is another reason it is good to learn much of your homesteading skills before you move to your homestead. We learned how to can, how to wash laundry by hand, how to garden and how to make homemade bread while living in an apartment. Our apartment was in the country, but in a very busy area and there were many other renters. We were fortunate in the fact, that nobody else was into this. So nobody else wanted to harvest the fruits from the crab apple or pear trees that grew there. It was an old farm that had been turned into apartments.

Our clothesline!

Living there was where I had my first clothesline as a grown up. When I was a child, my family had one at several places. But this clothesline in our apartment ran from our upstairs tiny porch out to a pole in the yard. I loved it! My husband and I did all our chores together. Some of the time I was working a full time job and he was not. So he did more of the chores than I did. Sometimes it was the other way around, him working and me at home. It was a partnership and still is to this day. Working together gets us further down our path.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

My Top Homesteading Skills To Learn Or Improve

Our paddock was completely wooded 11 years ago.

On Homesteading Today, my favorite homesteading forum, one of the threads today was about making a list of things you want to learn how to do. I made my list and realized some of the items I listed are not that I don't know how to do them, it is that I just haven't made the effort to do them. I am going to start cutting down on my computer time so that I can do my homesteading chores. They should be my top priority.

I want to learn to:

grow an asparagus bed
grow fruits - apple trees, pear trees, plum trees, various berries
to build a hen house that will be VERY safe from critters
to make one of my raised beds into a cold frame bed for winter greens
to make soap
to increase my preps - double our supplies
to make more of my own tinctures, extracts, lotions and salves.
make fermented foods
make hard cheeses
improve my picklemaking skills
make my own dairy products from local raw milk
identify wild mushrooms
be more experienced with guns and get a pistol permit - needed where I live

This book is essential for homesteaders!

Some of these skills I need a refrigerator for, and as my regular readers know, I am living without that luxury for the time being. That is one convenience I don't recommend going without........it is hard! I have made cheese before, but the softer varieties, and that was back when I had the gas refrigerator. I have canned cheese from the store and sometimes it came out and sometimes it did not. Truthfully, I would much rather buy my cheese from local cheese makers and not the store, but sometimes I have not had much choice, money wise you know. So making my own is something I definitely want to do.

Carla Emery's book, The Encyclopedia of Country Living is filled with the instructions on so many homesteading skills that I don't know how anyone can live without it. I use it constantly, as you can see my copy is duct taped together! I belong to another homesteading forum that is only for NY homesteaders and recently our administrator had posted the directions for making the soap. I might try that in the near future. His directions were pretty good. By the way, anyone from NY state who wants to join it, contact me and I can arrange it. It is a private forum and you can only become a member if you know someone. Newbies are VERY welcome! We love to help them. But you have to be from NY.

As I work on these skills I will write a post detailing what I am doing, how I am doing it and take photos in the process. Hopefully, I can accomplish these skills and as I work on them more, will gain the experience to be able to share them with my readers here. What skills are you wanting to learn? Is there a skill that you have recently learned? If so, and you have written on your blog about it, post it in my comment section and I will write about it in future posts about homesteading skills.

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