Old Fashioned On Purpose

95. How I Learned How to Homestead

March 18, 2020 Jill Winger
Old Fashioned On Purpose
95. How I Learned How to Homestead
Show Notes Transcript

Contrary to popular belief, I wasn’t born into the homestead life.  If you go back and listen to some of my first episodes you can get the full story on how Christian and I caught the homestead bug.  In the end, learning how to homestead has been nothing more than an insatiable desire to learn and taking massive imperfect action everyday.  Listen today as I dig into some of my favorite places to gather information.  I know some of you will be inspired to take some action of your own.  

Links from show: 

>> Head over to www.theprairiehomestead.com for from-scratch recipes, homestead inspiration, and old-fashioned tutorials.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the old fashioned on purpose podcast. So if you've listened to other episodes, you know that I was not raised in this homestead lifestyle. I didn't have any local homesteading mentors when we started. There were no wise, knowledgeable relatives to show me the ropes and I didn't intend any sort of homesteading school or certification. So how did I learn to homestead? Well, the answer might surprise you and I'm hoping that it gives you a little bit of inspiration at the same time. I'm your host Jill winger and this is the podcast for the trailblazers, the Mavericks, the makers, the homesteaders, the modern pioneers, and the backyard farmers. If you've ever found yourself disenchanted with conformity and you like to swim upstream while the rest of society rides the river of least resistance, well you have found your tribe. I love living in this day and age and I realized that statement might surprise some of you because obviously I'm a little bit old fashioned. Okay. A lot old fashioned. I love old fashioned tenants and skills and food and you know, there's times I've wished that I lived back in, you know, a hundred years ago. But all that being said, I'm actually really thankful to be in this age of information. The reason being because it has never been easier to expand your knowledge to grow yourself or learn something new. I found this quote the other day, it's by someone named Donnie Miller. I don't know who he is, but I thought this was a great quote. It's very simple:"In the age of information. Ignorance is a choice." That's just powerful. Also a little bit of an ouch factor there. But it makes me think back to when we initially got the internet when I was a kid. I am in, I think the xennial generation is what I'm categorized at, which means that I was around before, like I can remember before technology really took hold, whereas like a millennial was generally raised in the age of lots of tech from the get go.

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But I remember when we got the internet for the first time, I have always been a little bit of a sponge as far as like how I soak up information. I love learning, AKA, you could probably call me a little bit of a nerd. And I remember when I was younger, before we got the internet, my parents had these sets of children encyclopedias and I would literally read them cover to cover. I just loved learning, especially like if there was a certain topic I was interested in, I could go to the encyclopedia and, and try to find it, look it up and sometimes I could find a little bit of info on it, sometimes was not there.

Speaker 1:

But, I was always on the hunt for learning about these different topics that I was interested in. And I always felt this certain underlying frustration because I felt like information was more limited. I mean, sure, I could find it in sometimes the encyclopedias or books we had on our bookshelves or I could go to the library and dig deeper. But if it was more obscure information, like I was really into horses, still am, and I would be looking up different in depth horse topics. A lot of books didn't have it and I couldn't find the info I needed and it was a lot of work to try to dig it up and I always was just a little bit annoyed at that until we got that internet connection for the first time. I can still remember what it sounds like when it dialed up that little pinging sound. But anyway, it felt magical because I could literally find information on anything, on my obscure horse topics. I found other people who were my age who were into horses and it was, it was incredible. Like it opened up my horizons like I couldn't believe. And at no other time in history have we been able to share information and assimilate it as quickly as we can today. And I think we take that for granted. Now obviously I need to say this right before we go any deeper. That can be a bad thing. I know, you know, the internet absolutely has a dark side that we have to be careful, careful with. And sometimes the fact of how information can spread so quickly, there's, there's a downfall when we have poor information or fearmongering information or the media can do ridiculous things. But you know, those things aside, the fact that we can go online and literally learn anything we want to learn, whether it's from a blog post or a podcast or a YouTube video that's unprecedented. And I, I like it. I think it's awesome, right? Like even silly things like if I need to know how to curl my hair, which is something I definitely need to learn more about because I'm really bad at it. Like I literally just go to YouTube and I Google hair curling tutorials and there's like 5 million. Whereas, you know, back in the day I would've had to go find someone who knew how to curl their hair, which would've been a lot harder for my introverted self. So from silly things like that, all the way up to more important skills, we have access to it. And like that quote says, ignorance is a choice because it is out there. Now, all that being said, with all this info floating around on the worldwide web, I still run into a number of folks who kind of are following in this mindset that they still need to learn from an approved, I'm using air quotes that you can't see an approved source for it to count for it to be official or legit. Now obviously that is definitely the way it used to be. If you wanted to learn anything new, you needed to go through an approved channel, whether that was college or some sort of certification or you have to go get a degree in the thing, but the paradigm is shifting. Like we're, we're moving into a different way of doing things and I've noticed, I'm always paying attention to this when I see different successful people, business owners, thought leaders. When you look at their credentials, many of them, you know, didn't go to college for the thing they're an expert in. They are self-taught kind of either school of hard knocks or they just wanted it so badly and spent so much time learning and trying that they became an expert over time. And I am starting to notice this trend. They're not even a trend, more of a fact that it's way less about what you went to college for or who added a certification to your resume and more about your ability to teach yourself and understand your learning style and solve the problems necessary to help you learn the next thing and get to the next step. Now, obviously there are exceptions to this. If you have a desire to be an open heart surgeon, I would definitely advise you to not learn that on YouTube. Please go to a college, get that information, get the degree, and get the proper letters behind your name. But if we're not talking about the medical field, right, we're not talking about maybe being a lawyer and we're talking about other things, you guys, we can get so much information and teach ourselves with the resources we have available. And that, in a nutshell, that's how I learned how to homestead the internet through books and magazines and the secret sauce to that equation, the secret sauce that I added into that recipe is drum roll please. Imperfect action. Okay. So when you combine all of this amazing information we have and you mix in a healthy measuring, a mental healthy measure, healthy measure of imperfect action, then you're eventually going to end up, I think, and I have experienced with mastery. So here's how this works. Let me break this down for you. Okay. Number one. It always starts cause I have an interest in a topic. Maybe it's gardening, maybe it's building raised beds, maybe it's sourdough bread, or I'm butchering a chicken, right? So I always start by Googling it. I read blogs on the topic, I watch some videos, I like to get a smattering of opinions. I don't like to get just one side of the issue or one method. I like to read all of methods, not all of them, cause you could spend your life, you know what I mean? Read a good healthy selection of the different opinions out there on whatever topic it may be. I also am sure to check out any books or resources or videos or whatever by whoever is considered to be the expert in that field because there's a difference between your random blog article and I'm a blogger so I can say this, you know, a random blog article versus someone who has devoted their life to the topic. So I like to get some expert opinions and mix those in with the real world thoughts and methods that I might see on YouTube or on Google. And here is okay, next step, most important part. This is the big one. I then take action, right? I learn a little and then I put down the books, put down the computer and I go try it. And this is the part that I see a lot of people getting stuck on. They get that paralysis by analysis and they feel like they can't take action because they don't know enough yet. And there's just a point where you have to jump off the cliff and you're not going to ever feel 100% prepared to do so, but you just got to try it, right? So after I take action, then I generally mess up in some way, shape, or form. You guys got to see this in real life. On one of my recent YouTube videos when I tried to season a cast iron skillet, totally just destroyed it, not destroyed it. That's not the right word. I messed it up royally. Like I use the wrong oil. I cooked it for the wrong amount of time. It was gummy, it was gross. So I went back to Google, I looked at the books again, I did some troubleshooting as to where I went wrong and tried it again. Right? And that's what I do usually, whether it's the gardening mistakes I've made, the chicken mistakes I've made. I made a lot of mistakes. But you go back and do the troubleshooting and then you get back on the horse and you try it again. And it's really just a process of rinsing and repeating and tweaking until you get the result you're after. And the funny thing, you do that long enough, you're, you're going to have a good collection of knowledge on it. You might even have an expert level of knowledge and then you'll have friends asking, how did you do it? How'd you get the garden to grow? How'd you get the chickens to do that? How did you get the sourdough bread to turn out so well? And then you find yourself giving advice and you are now the one who is helping other people to learn. So it's kind of cool. And like I said, it's not the method that I would recommend learning dentistry or open heart surgery with, but for homesteading and gardening and cooking, it works really, really well. And I just want to encourage you to dive in and you don't have to wait for someone to spoonfeed you or you don't have to wait for some sort of certification or official program to come along for whatever you're interested in. Just start learning and you'll be surprised at with a little bit of dedicated effort how quickly things will fall place So it has begun my friend, gardening season that is, and maybe you're not quite digging out in the garden just yet. I know I'm not there because there is still snow on the ground, but odds are you're probably in the thick of planning and dreaming and buying seeds and to make the process just a little bit easier, I've put together a pack of garden planning printables as well as some of my favorite vegetable varieties and you can grab the whole thing for free over at theprairiehomestead.com/gardenplan and that is it for today. Don't forget to hit subscribe so all the new episodes show up immediately in your podcast player. It's just a little bit easier for you and I would love it if you could take a minute to leave a quick review or rating while you're over there if you found this episode helpful. Thanks so much for listening. I enjoy hanging out with you every week and we'll catch up again on the next episode of the old fashioned on purpose podcast.