Tuesday, October 21, 2008

A New Start




This blog is a place for me to hold myself accountable to my dreams. My plan is to simplify my life and get back to the basics. I want to grow a vegetable garden. Learn to pressure can. Raise and preserve as much of my own food as I can.

I want to learn how to make my life calm and serene and a place that I really want to be. I want to learn skills that will maintain that lifestyle and pass them along to my kids and grandkids. I want to love my life. I want to LIVE.

To that end, I am digging back in to the homesteading lifestyle in my new home. A second-floor apartment in town with a very small lot. The yard has 2 fruit trees and 2 grapevines, as well as an empty vegetable garden waiting to be put to bed for the winter. I am planning for next year's veggies already and cannot wait for the seed catalogs to come in. I am busily harvesting fruit and making preserves and butters right and left. I am really enjoying it so far.

The point of homesteading is to bring old skills back to the fore. To make my life a purposeful, deliberate action. To leave as small a footprint on the planet as possible, while leaving an indelible mark on the soul of the universe. To LIVE, as opposed to existing. To enjoy and celebrate my life every day that I am breathing. To make the dash between the dates on my gravestone count for something.

It's going to be interesting to try to make this work in an apartment. Things like organizational skills, financial savvy, etc.; these are a great place to start. But all in all, it's about starting with what you need now. So, my start is to work on food storage. Finding ways to stretch my budget to include doubles of items to build storage with. Finding inventive places and methods of storing dry and canned goods. To utilize the space in my home to it's best advantage. To make changes in our diet that will utilize the foods we can safely store. To learn to be a good steward of the planet I am borrowing. We'll see how it works out as we go.

This week's project will be to finish bringing all my kitchen supplies to the new house and set up my kitchen in a way that provides me with the most effective storage for everything and still looks neat and tidy. Today is Tuesday and I want to be finished with this on Friday evening. Here goes....................

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