Homesteading brings many challenges, but it creates an interesting by-product: Preparedness.
We spend our day to day lives raising animals, growing a garden, and homeschooling our children. These tasks are the same tasks you need to become self-sufficient. Growing a chunk of your food removes the need for as many grocery store trips.
It’s the same with raising children. By homeschooling, you get the choice to teach what you want, when you want. This extra time allows you to teach out-of-the-box skills, like operating a tractor or working a Ham radio.
Every skill or jar of home-processed food builds your preparedness factor up one notch. You are much more prepared than the city dweller neighbor.
But there is a catch.
Skills take time to learn and practice. And tools or gear that you purchase also need work. It can quickly spiral out of control and overwhelm the mind. You add a tractor, and now you need to do oil changes on the tractor. Add a whole house generator, and it too needs maintenance. Skills like medical training need regular use or you forget them.
Just like you would not drive your car with no headlights in the dark, these tools, like your car, need attention. Time is static, we only have so much. Add too many tools and everything starts to fall apart. Soon enough your barn is leaning sideways, and people are stopping at the side of the road to take pictures of your ‘historical’ house.
I talk about preventive maintenance in this week’s article. Specifically creating a plan that balances the needs for maintenance with scheduling and time constraints, while not leaving the lack of maintenance as a luck of the draw to see if your tools will work. Because luck of the draw leads to burnout or worse.
Preparedness can be a goal. Just like Homesteading is a goal. The reality is we need to balance the homestead life and preparedness goals, so we don’t end up buried by our task list.
Maybe it’s best to look at preparedness as a convenient side effect to your homesteading journey when you first start out. Slow growth is better than overwhelm.
Or flip the coin and look at your homestead journey as a side effect of becoming prepared for the unknown. The choice is yours.