Life is like a box of spare parts

If you’ve visited us even for a bit on this little piece o’ the internet, my hope is that you have learned a thing or two, offered your own sage advice or just simply enjoyed staying a while to see that we really enjoy figuring things out and that, a lot of times, includes learning from others. This is why I continually seek out advice from neighbors, friends - you - on just about anything that has either stumped us or for when we are looking to improve on something or work through a better technique and at the same time, also offer any advice on something that has worked well for us.

Our family loves to get down and dirty and at least make valiant attempts to do all kinds of things as well as we can without having to pay someone to do it for us. We’re talking fence repair and upfit, simple (and sometimes not-so-simple) repairs and maintenance to household appliances and furniture, vehicle repair and maintenance including yard and farm equipment, keeping animals in, keeping critters that may eat said animals out and general repair and maintenance of whatever interesting challenge is presented to us on any day.

We did indeed make the family decision that we’d leave the coffee, toilet paper, bananas and avocados up to someone else to grow and distribute. So self-“sufficiency” is not our gig. We try to be as self-reliant as we can be. Our family’s idea and execution of self-reliance may look different than someone else’s. For instance, I do not make fresh goat or sheep cheese for our family (yet) because a.) there are no goats or sheep currently residing at the prancing chicken farm and b.) I will have to learn from my neighbor how to make his delicious cheeses that he’s already been experimenting with on us. Uggh. So tasty.

And also I have not built a house. Unless you count LEGOs.

See?! We by no means are doing all the things. But I do want sheep. I do want to practice more cheese-making as well as yogurt, and things that I don’t even know exist involving some sort of animal milk. Oh my goodness, not to mention the farm babies that will need to be here in order for all that milk to be produced. Squeee! That’s going to have to be another post…sigh…

I hop on online forums, instagram, sites that welcome questions and offer what has worked for them. I love the community around growing your own food, sustainable “foodscaping”, the place that farm animals have in your very local ecosystem (your backyard and pastures). Crop rotation. Succession planting. Animal/plant pasture rotation. Fantastically interesting and proven ways of treating the land with respect and giving as much or more than we reap.

I love learning how to incorporate safe and practical ideas to include wildlife in garden and yard planning, not to fight them off, if they’re destroying ornamentals and/or crops but instead to attract them onto thoughtfully-planted distracting plants, placed away from your cherished plants with natural barriers to help deflect and deter them. Deer are going to be there. Rabbits gotta munch. It’s a matter of looking at this with a little knowledge of animal behavior and understanding that there is always give and take. Plant enough so that you can afford to give up a little then harvest what you actually need.

There are so many projects we want to work on, planting techniques we want to try, scaling up, scaling down. We also realize that all good things take time. We’ve had to learn to be very patient with all the things and strive to always be open to learning. That doesn’t mean that I or we agree with everything we read. Of course not. But you don’t know what you don’t know, right?! So reading, researching and learning as much as you can makes sense to weed through what is going to work for you.

Something you’ve been trying to figure out for a while? Or something you stumble across that just makes sense? Be open to something different or something new! Gardening, animals, anything! Keep a journal or notebook to make a note of interesting things you come across that make sense to you. You may not need it right away but it’s really cool when you’re in conversation with someone, can’t remember what that product was called for the life of you but you remember you wrote it down in your notebook and lo! Now you remember! And that triggers something else you remember. And so on. Just make sure that you can find the reading glasses still on top of your head so that you can SEE all of your notes. Ahem.

Point is, it’s important just to listen. You never know when that piece of valuable information will show itself. You may not even know that it’s as valuable as it is until you start rummaging through that box of spare parts of information and it literally just clicks into place.