The unspoken challenge

The truth is, over the past few weeks or so I've been really interested in becoming more "old fashioned."  That's the term I am using, because self-sufficient, living off the land, having a homestead - all of those things sound so serious and it makes me want to laugh at myself.  Well it makes the me from 3 years ago that lived in a townhouse in the suburbs and drove into DC semi-often want to laugh at me.

I've really been feeling the pressure that I've been putting on myself, which I don't think is a bad thing.  There is just a lot I want to do, and really this is the biggest and  most important challenge that I am facing, and yet I don't have a weekly list or a calendar to get me through it.

You see, I want to garden.  I want to produce so much extra food it will make my head spin.



And then I want to start canning.

And dehydrating.

And freezing.

I want to have shelves of garden fresh food in my basement so that I can just walk downstairs to grab some fresh tomato sauce or some homemade pickles in the middle of the winter.


I want to be able to cook up a meal and have everything in it, besides the meat, if something I grew or made on my own.

So the pressure is on.  I have half of my dinning room table covered in seeds that are already starting to sprout.  I have bags and boxes of bulbs and seeds that are ready to go.  The garden is tilled.

But I have so much to do.

I have to measure out and mark the garden and then start preparing the rows.  I need to get newspaper and mulch so that I can clear the rows in the garden from weeds.  I need to buy some sort of fencing to put around the garden to keep the chickens out so they don't destroy the plants.

I need to move more boulders to create the last raised bed by the house and then plant strawberry bushes there.

I have to paint my garden rock labels.



I need to buy a pressure canner and all of the jars.  I need to buy a dehydrator.


I need to get the new coop built so I can get more chickens.

And during all of this, I need to keep planting the seeds in the house to get a head start on the garden.

There is a lot of upfront cost to this challenge.  But I know, in the long run, it will completely be worth it.

I just home that my kids learn from this and that they can look back on it and appreciate it.

So that's the truth.  It's the challenge that I find the most important, and yet it is the one that I haven't publicly confessed to.