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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> I downsized, perhaps even too much, to
> the point where I now want to upsize a bit.

Downsizing and then building back up to the level you want is a very good 
homestead mechanism.  It's like tuning a stringed instrument where you loosen 
the 
string a bit before bringing it up to the proper tension.  The Budha is said 
to have attained enlighenment when he heard a musician on a passing boat 
telling his student, "If the string is to tight, it will break. It it is too 
loose, 
it will not play."

Crises are often the way nature brings about those downsizings in our affairs.

When I first got onto this larger acreage here, I dashed about like a madman 
tilling up this and planting that.  Even the successes came to no useful end. 
 
I could not easily drop the mentality from the business world that more and 
bigger is always better.  I was raising gardens and flocks and then figuring 
out what I was going to do with them.

But the whole paradigm flipped around at some point and I looked at it from 
the other end.  There was no point in preparing any more than we would eat.  
There was no point in preserving more than we would prepare.  There was no 
point 
in processing more than we were going to perserve.  There was no point in 
picking more than we'd process.  There was no point in planting more than 
we'd 
pick.  

It took some mental discipline to work this out.  The urge in the headiness 
of early spring was to say, I've got the space, I've got the seedlings, I'll 
put out 300 spring cabbages.  Fact is, we'd be hard pressed to actually eat 
25 
before the summer cole crops come in, so there is absolutely no point in 
growing that many (for our own use, unless they are going to be marketed.)   
There 
is still an unholy voice that whispers in one's ear when one puts out the 40 
spring cabbage plants (a few extra for loses).

Did you ever have the experience of cleaning out a room or a drawer and when 
you'd picked through it for an hour and it was as cluttered and messy as it 
had been in the beginning, you then stopped trying to take out what needed 
discarding and istead took out everything then only put back what you knew 
you 
wanted to keep?  Downsizing a homestead is that way.  With some experience a 
homesteader gets a good idea what is needed and what works.  Often it's best 
to 
empty out the homestead and put back only those things that are profitable 
and 
doabe.