Homestead mailing list

[sjc <indexer AT fairpoint.net>]

Lynn Wigglesworth wrote:
> Bob; have you considered starting your Homesteading experience by joining a 
> CSA (community supported agriculture) where you are now? You can actually 
> work at the farm for your share, harvesting or packing bags for pickup. It 
> would give you fresh vegetables and a feeling of what it's like to be on a 
> productive piece of land.
>
>   
Or there are all sorts of apprentice situations around here, although 
living at one's own home and commuting to an 'apprenticeship' is never 
going to give  the "feel" for homesteading.  Check and see what's 
there.  Here there are weekend opportunities (pretty short but better 
than nothing), episodic deals  (such as  lambing season only, or  a week 
to butcher large animals and put up the meat, etc), by-the-month, by the 
season (usually market gardening or other gardening-related), things 
that focus on one specific part of living on the land (logging with 
horses, setting up a sheep dairy, etc), and so on all the way up to 
full-year or 5-year situations.  Some are paid, some are not, some are 
exchanges of various kinds.  Look at WOOF or MOFGA for ideas.  Then look 
and ask around to see what's where you are, or what's where you might 
like to spend a month, a year, learning.  There's a lot to learn, even 
part-time or in small chunks, and much of it has not so much to do with 
the subject at hand but with the peripheral (well, peripheral to the 
task at hand) lifestyle and living information.

Or make up your mind to learn one new thing about a subject per day; 
keep a "research" log, or put information into an outline, but somehow 
write it down, and perform one new physical process (a new way to plant 
something, try fitting a new handle to an old toolhead, whatever) and 
keep a log of that, along with results when appropriate) a day right 
where you are now.  Repetition doesn't count (which is not to say it's 
not essential)!  Trial and error counts; what is life but trial and 
error?  The trick is to learn to recognize and decline to repeat the 
errors, while continuing the trials...without which we don't gain much, 
either in knowledge or otherwise.

Successful (personally successful, that is, not talking economics here) 
homesteading isn't something one acquires without trying it out, to me.  
Rather, it's absorbed, part of self.

SusanJane, in Maine, where the sun is finally shining again!