How To Take Back Your Power

While the world falls to hell around us, think about this today, and ponder how you can apply this wisdom at your house.

"To let people arrange their own food, energy and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them."
Bill Mollison

It Is The Age of Doing

I read a lot of blogs, but the ones that I tend to return to  time and again are the ones the authors try and live their truth. They DO.  There is much merit in ideas and theories but after a time, we have to get off our behinds and do something with those ideas. Whether it's to "beat the rush and collapse now" as the ArchDruid suggests or to start preserving, recycling and de-cluttering, we need to stop talking about it and start doing.
We here are following my own advice. We are de-cluttering, even though it's frightening, enlightening and blatantly shocking sometimes. (Note to self: de-clutter more often than once every dozen years)
When I first started planning on growing our own food, I learned all I could about season extension. But as I've been comparing the overall weather and temperature of the new homestead to where we live now, I find that I've neglected a very important factor in food production. Drought.

drought |drout|
noun
a prolonged period of abnormally low rainfall; a shortage of water resulting from this.
• [usu. with adj. ] figurative a prolonged absence of something specified : he ended a five-game hitting drought.
• archaic thirst.

One of the ways we'll be dealing with drought is to store water in rain barrels. Over time, my Dad has been gathering the barrels and spouts, next comes the gutters and downspouts and screens to keep out bugs and other nasties. I'll be developing raised beds in which to grow our vegetables, instead of the traditional rows, because this will allow me to grow more intensively, rotate crops, grow green manure crops, grow sprouts for the chickens and even put a temporary chicken pen over temporarily fallow beds. I'll be able to cover the beds in case of frost, marauding birds or excessive sun, as well as keep out the friendly rabbit.

An important element of any homestead, I'm learning, is drainage,  whether it be in the garden or the septic leach field. I mention this because last week, I had an epiphany. The last time I lived on our mini-homestead, I didn't need to worry about the infrastructure of our place, my parents worried about that. But life has changed us and our circumstances. Now I need to know how well our land drains. I need to learn how the septic system works, where it is and how to manage it. I need to learn not only about this but about so many other things, and then I need to make the management of the homestead a working part of every day, while I learn about all the other things I haven't realized that I don't know yet.
I need to learn, to do. I need to do what it takes to build on what is there, do what it takes to build our success year after year, and teach others by demonstration, on both my You Tube channel and this blog and my freelance writing.

Indeed, it falls to each one of us to learn how to survive the coming decline of our economies as well as society. It is the responsibility of each of us to learn how to lives with less, do more with what we have and pass on our knowledge of these things. In this way lies our best hope.

It is time to do something.
What will you do?