PREPPING in the Waiting Room (Food security, supply chain issues and what you CAN do)

hey guys what is up welcome back to roots and refuge farm my name is jess i'm in my kitchen i'm sitting at the counter i have a lovely warm cup of afternoon tea just perfect for this fall day and i have my notebook here with some really important points that i want to go over with you guys today i want to give you some expectations of what i'm going to be talking about um this is going to be a chat video so you definitely want to get your cup of tea get a notebook out if you want to take notes or if you're the kind of person who likes doing this put your headphones in and wash the dishes while you listen to this like a podcast sometimes i am torn as a content creator between wanting to make really visually engaging messages but also needing to get a lot of information across and today this is just what i have the capacity to do so we're going to sit down and we're going to talk very classroom style now you can probably gather from the title of this video that today i'm talking about preparedness this is not a topic that i just spent a whole lot of time on because i am very much cautious when it comes to what i present to you guys not to stir up fear in people i think fear is so the enemy of wisdom and it can become such a pusher to put us in a place of making really poor decisions and really not living our life to the fullest when i first realized the brokenness of our food system was when my son asher was born and asher is now closing in on his 15th birthday and he had a lot of food allergies and i was having to read labels of food for the very first time when i was nursing him to make sure that i wasn't passing anything to him that he couldn't handle and it woke me up and my eyes were just completely open to the detriment of the food that we were being presented as options by the broken food system and i thought this isn't healthy and i began educating myself and i began learning how i wanted to do things and it really brought me back to sourcing things well and that was really where the desire to grow my own food was was really birthed with a passion in my life i'd always loved the idea of a farm from when i was a little girl but that's when it became like a life mission for me to want to bring my family back in connection with where our food came from but in that process at the time i was living in an apartment knoxville tennessee and i did not have a lot of extra money shortly after that period i went through a divorce and was a single mother to two young boys and i felt so helpless about what i could do i had realized there was a need i had realized there was an issue but i was so afraid and i felt so helpless and this is really the period of my life where the ideology of turn your waiting room into a classroom came from that's a phrase that if you've been around here very long you've definitely heard me say because at that time i realized that i for my own peace of mind i had to do something but there was very little that i actually had the power and the resources to do and i've shared before that that's whenever i began foraging blackberries and that's how i learned to can was by forage blackberries that i got on the roadside i learned to cook from scratch and do some other things and that was really i found so much freedom in gaining skills now also during that time i kind of dove off into reading some different forums and some different things and and kind of got off into some real like prepper material online of course this has been close to 15 years ago and um you know what i found when i immersed myself in a lot of that talk and a lot of that culture of preparing for really like a real major societal fallout it was really what a lot of people were preparing for um i got just terrified i could not i could not emotionally handle the level of intensity and fear and anxiety that that line of thinking brought into me and i didn't really feel like that was something i was supposed to cultivate in myself i don't i don't really feel like getting into fear is gonna produce anything good but obviously we did not forsake awareness of any need for being prepared because we continued as you know the years have unfolded i have continued and then of course in marrying jeremiah and us really partnering together and continuing to become sustainable in our food sourcing i've always told you guys that i'm not a prepper because i don't consider myself one in the sense that i have seen people claim to be preppers like i don't have an attic full of mres i'm not concerned with storing years and years worth of dry goods my goal has been to be prepared by storing wisdom and storing lessons and skills and being prepared for anything that life might throw our way by having the capacity to do things for ourselves this is not a political video and i'm not going to have a political conversation um it is wisdom to not be completely dependent for your food on any system at all no matter what if you lose a job or if you have a health crisis or if you have a child that comes along that has severe food allergies and you can't afford to go buy all organic and all you know natural things from the store it's good to have the ability to grow your own food so right now the reason why i'm bringing this topic to you and i'm going to be talking to you guys a lot over the course the next few months about skills and about tools and about things that you can do and how to do them the reason i'm doing this right now is because there's just a mass movement that has really begun building in my country i live in the united states i currently live in south carolina we've relocated this year from arkansas to south carolina and there's a mass movement that's happening here and from the feedback i've gotten there's been a movement happening all over the world where people are desiring to grow their own food and i love that movement i am so excited to see that and in the 15 years that i have become more aware of the need of this and desiring to source things well i see that the world has changed in a lot of ways it's not so obscure anymore to grow a garden and want grass-fed beef and to be mindful of the ethics behind where your food is coming from um organic gardening is not the anomaly that it was even 15 years ago and it's awesome because you know we have the unusual thing as for me a millennial there are still people on the earth that go well when i was a kid organic is just what we did homesteading we didn't call it homesteading we didn't call it organic we just called it life and there's this other generation that's coming up underneath us the the you know my children's generation that they have peers that are so far removed from that that it is just completely foreign to them and here for me personally i'm kind of in the middle and i don't want to forsake the opportunity to gain the skills that are still here amongst us and pass them on to the generation that's coming up and i think that these conversations are important no matter what we're to play out politically no matter what we're to play out as far as the imminent need for growing food we just i think that we have to say okay somebody has to care about this and i see people caring about it i am recognizing that in a lot of ways the audience that i have here on this channel has changed in some ways i've seen it in the last four years there are more people now than ever before that i have contact with that are taking action i've probably received 15 messages in the last week of people saying we're finally doing it we're making the jump we're moving out of the city we're buying land or messages from people who are not moving out of the city they live in apartments they live on retired fixed incomes they they live in neighborhoods and they're not interested in moving out of them and they're saying i i don't feel like i'm supposed to make that kind of change but what can i do right here where i am and so that's why i want to make videos like this because this is the video i wish i could have found um whenever i was first being like my eyes were first being open to a need to grow food i wish that i could have found information like this i think that i would have saved myself a period of jumping into fear because i don't think that we have to be afraid to be aware um i think that taking action uh where we can can can spare us a lot of the feelings of anxiety but also just knowing there are a lot of things that we can do to walk in wisdom and preparedness so today the topic of this video is turning your waiting room into a classroom and how to be prepared where you are i want to ask you to please step into the role here as a teacher you don't have to be an expert if you have a tip or something that you would like to share and kindness and encouragement without fear please put it in the comments section um and also keep in mind that some of these things i've really thought a lot about this some of these things you might take for granted that you already do and i want you to take it as encouragement when you realize oh i already do that and maybe consider how could you share that information with people because there are certain things that when you know them you don't even realize the fact that you have a gym there you don't even realize that you have gold there it's just something that you know so you don't consider it and so maybe keep that in mind as i'm going through this list and if you have something to add please do and consider how you could share this information with other people so the first thing that you can do where you are to be prepared is learn to eat seasonally now this skill does not seem like a really important one but it is actually very valuable so i remember whenever i first started looking into food sustainability um it was news to me that the reason why asparagus was cheaper in the grocery store in the spring was because that's when it grew that was completely foreign to me and i i still will talk to people who will say something in like november and they'll say yeah i'm really wanting to learn to can do you know where i can buy local strawberries i'm like well you can buy them locally in april or may when they grow here that's just something that a lot of people do not know and i cannot very succinctly package that up for you and tell you this is in season here there because you guys are all over the world i can really tell you what grows in what season in arkansas and i'm learning well what grows in what season in south carolina which is very similar to arkansas but some different but it is very beneficial to know what grows in each season in the general location of where you are that will tell you when you need to really focus on preserving certain crops it's going to tell you when things are going to be a little more affordable or maybe easier to get in bulk it's also going to tell you when you can grow things in your garden which is a really big deal for instance a lot of people don't know that they can grow food through the winter if you live in a place that has a pretty mild winter lots of things grow even when it's freezing outside if you plant them in time brassicas and cool weather crops like kale and lettuce and cabbage but this is information that you can learn no matter where you are you can pay attention what is on sale different places you can call around to local farms that do you pick and bushels and bulk buying options and find out what is a season for certain things and this is going to protect you like when you go to plant your garden in the spring and it's may and you see a bunch of cabbages uh started for sale well for me i could never plant cabbages in may they would go straight to seed it would be way too warm where i live they still put them for sale at the store and a lot of people buy them because they just don't know better so definitely learn what plants what food crops grow during certain times of year where you live next kind of goes in line with that get to know your local farmers it is really awesome to have food sourcing that you are close with um whenever the grocery store shelves did empty um you you can't necessarily go to the manager that grocery store and say hey i really need you to look out for me here because he's having a lot of different customers that he doesn't know personally that he's having to manage a crisis situation however if you have a local farmer that you have been showing up at their house every week and buying raw milk or fresh eggs or maybe helping them go tie up their tomatoes and trade for some some tomatoes and you have a relationship with a local farmer or even a very small scale farmer when something like that happens they might only have the capacity to service 10 families but if you have that built relationship you have a really good chance of being in one of those slots so definitely build a relationship with a local farmer and support them when you don't desperately need what they have so that if there comes a time where you really need what they have they will in turn support you this is getting connected to your food sourcing and while as someone who was very low income during the time being awakened to this it was it was very overwhelming to me because i thought oh my gosh this is so expensive like going to the farmer's market was so expensive um going to like buying grass-fed beef trying to go into a place like whole foods and buying this meat that i knew was better there's no way that i could have afforded it however in building relationship a lot of times you can find that you have something of value to people there people are still bartering and trading and there are farmers who might need a babysitter sometimes there are people who might need something that you can offer and trade for them anytime that you are that you don't have money to bring to the table in order to get something that you need of value think of what other value you have to bring to the table and i'm not telling you contact people and say hey what can you do for me because i can't do anything for you think about what you can do for them because there really really is value in that and that again goes to putting a name and a face to the food that you're putting on your table and knowing who put the hard work in there and if you can afford it by all means afford it if if it's not something that's like a super stretch shoe it might be less convenient to maybe go to a farm and get your milk versus just getting it while you're at the grocery store but in trading off some of that convenience you are providing food security for yourself by building that relationship next point learn to cook from scratch now this is one of those things that so many people tell me well i'm just a really terrible cook and i beg to differ you are not a terrible cook you're an unlearned cook and you can learn and i feel that this is one of those things if you have any desire at all to grow your food learning to cook from scratch is just a skill that is just as important as learning to garden or learning to build something or learning to milk a cow any of that stuff learning to cook from scratch because if you're going to grow a lot of your food you know it just it doesn't come packaged it doesn't come with instructions on the back you're going to grow ingredients and knowing what to do with them is a massive part of having success in growing food it is overwhelming at first um one of the things that i've really run into in learning to cook from scratch is that if you start looking up farmhouse recipes and farm cooking it's very very very bread heavy and i like bread i'm working on perfecting sourdough as we speak but bread um and very bread heavy heavy recipes they don't settle well with us we are not um gluten people like we don't do super great with that and i have to constantly walk that line of like wanting to be able to make a lot of things from scratch without going way off into eating tons and tons of bread because it just doesn't do well for my family and so i would encourage you to find what does work for your family and because if you start thinking i want to learn to cook from scratch and you start making a lot of recipes that are not sustainable for you guys to live on you'll end up reverting back to what last worked for you offsetting anything that you regularly buy at the grocery store is a really really good place to start especially things like seasonings like if you're purchasing things like seasoning salts like you can make all of that stuff from scratch significantly cheaper than you can buy it at the store and then there are other things like do you buy syrup at the store um if you're buying like pancake syrup that's so easy to make from scratch significantly cheaper really easy and it's really tasty if you're buying vanilla extract that's easy to make at home anything that you're buying that when you turn over that label has more than like five or six ingredients i would encourage you to sit down with those things like if you're regularly buying cream soups or seasoning or easy boxed dinners i would encourage you to just sit down with that cream soup you know cream of mushroom and and do a google search and just say cream you know cream of mushroom soup from scratch and familiarize yourself with how these are made another thing if you have an ingredient like that you use regularly let's say if you use like buttermilk regularly or something like that look up substitution for buttermilk because you can you can pretty much substitute buttermilk by putting some sort of acid like lemon juice and regular milk and and substitute that on the fly and knowing those little tricks is just going to make you so much more confident and efficient in the kitchen being able to produce food if certain ingredients are not available to you um in it what happens if you're not someone who cooks regularly from scratch and i'm sure all of my you know scratch cooks here can give me an amen on this but what happens is eventually your mindset just completely shifts on the matter i feel more bewildered now by using really heavily processed ingredients than i do by things that i can pronounce and things that i know what they are and i know what to expect from them i know how these things work in the kitchen and this just comes with experience but that experience is learned by slowly trading out those ingredients and sometimes you know you're going to decide you want to buy some convenience food and that's okay but having the knowledge to not need to is really imperative and it's something that you can do to be prepared for any situation in the meantime because truly cooking from scratch is most of the time significantly cheaper and it does enable you to source your food well because organic or like grass-fed dairy or organic meat any processed foods that have those ingredients in it they're just astronomical in price and i mean i have five sons like there's no way that i could feasibly feed them organic processed foods it would be it would be so expensive um it would just be insane if i want to feed them good ingredients it has to be from scratch and this opens that door to you so the next thing teamwork makes the dream work build a community find a community your friends that are interested in this are some of the greatest resources you have in making this successful because what you will find whenever you decide to step off into sufficiency is that you cannot do everything jeremiah and i do this because of youtube we're able to really do homesteading and farming full-time we're here we're able to hire help from other people and we're able to get a lot done we still are not able to do everything and so keeping in mind that a community means that i can say hey i'm really really good at gardening but i don't know anything about um inoculating mushrooms that's something that i've just never really gotten deeply into and it's one of those things i'd like to learn i'd like to learn how to do that stuff but man my list is long and my my time is short and so what i end up doing is trading tomatoes for mushrooms i find people who are interested in some of the same things in me as me and they have different strengths than i do and by building community and saying hey i have this you have that i get to be less dependent on food that i don't know where it came from and there are so many things that you may want to do but that would be easier if you had a partner it is very very valuable to work with other people either playing on strengths and weaknesses and filling in the gaps for one another or alleviating the load by partnering together next learn to preserve this is one of the things that i can look back and say i actually got that one right because for a lot of the time that i look back on when i was living in town or i was living in an apartment i'm like man i miss so much opportunity here to prepare myself and i could have learned the hard lessons i learned later on a larger scale on a smaller scale with less loss but i will tell you that in the period of my waiting room i learned to preserve food and starting early gives you an opportunity to build skills but it also gives you an opportunity to kind of spread out the stocking of your kitchen because this is one of those areas where having good tools makes a really big difference and for a lot of people if you're waiting until you absolutely need that stuff to preserve your own harvest you're gonna end up coming down to it and being like wow i need a pressure canner i need a dehydrator i need all of these tools all at once and then you're looking at a really big expense and if you're not able to afford all of those things you're you're looking at being limited with the pressure of a lot of harvest coming in and needing to figure out what to do with it even if you have to go buy the produce at the grocery store in order to learn to preserve that's okay do that in fact i would even say it's probably better to learn to preserve on store-bought produce that cost you a whole lot less input than waiting until it's your own work that you worked really hard on because if you make a mistake which one would you rather lose so learning to do things like water bath canning pressure canning dehydrating just simply drying um all of these things are skills that you can do right now you know go buy a 10 pound package of beef and pressure can it so that it's shelf stable and you know what you've got some convenient fast meals right there in your pantry you've got a skill that you've learned and great one day you want to be able to raise your own cattle and now you're going to know what to do with that meat and by spacing out the purchase of all of those tools by the time you get to a place that you really really need them you can have a fully stocked kitchen because this was such a hobby of mine for every christmas and birthday from for my loved ones for years leading up to when i actually had a farm i was asking for tools like that i loved getting tools like that that made my you know hobby easier to do so i was well stocked on having crocks and different things that i could ferment in and and dehydrators and all of that i had been collecting jars for a really long time and so when it came down to needing it i already had a lot of resources there because i've been spread out over the course of years next kind of in the same line is that stock your pantry now this is also one of those things that i have to put a disclaimer on i'm not telling you guys that you need to go out and blow the extent of your grocery budget buying all the beans and rice that they have available at the store i'm really not encouraging that however i don't like seeing language being used that like being prepared or having a stocked pantry is hoarding i have in the last 15 years i've never had a period of time that i did not have enough food in my pantry that i could feed my family for a solid few months without having to go to the store that is just how we live and it really did not start as like oh gosh i don't know what's gonna happen in the world i had a bunch of little kids man they got sick they all got sick and there might actually be a few week periods where it was extremely inconvenient to go to the store and that was the period of time where i stopped living from grocery store vision visit to grocery store visit and by learning to shop sales and being very aware of how much things cost when things did go on sale instead of just buying the one i might need for the next week i would buy three or four and by doing that the next time i needed them i might not buy it because i knew i had some and i've not had a lot of food going bad in my pantry because we just rotate that out you know as my family has grown it's made a lot more sense for us to buy things in bulk so anyway like just prepping aside yeah i mean like we buy our flour and our sugar and all that stuff in 50 pound bags because we actually consume enough stuff quickly enough to warrant that but i also really like the fact that i mean when 2020 happened and and we were being told stay at home as much as possible over several weeks like it was not a stressful thing i mean obviously it was stressful to a certain degree but like it wasn't a matter of like oh gosh i have to go out or my kids are gonna be hungry so buying shelf stable things one thing that you can can keep in mind i mean you can keep a stock of beans or rice or pastas or stuff like that even if it's not something that you eat a whole lot of and just label the outside i like to put stuff in totes and label the outside this the date expiration date on those things and if it's gonna be coming down to it you can always donate stuff that you don't feel like you can use um i don't like wasting food and so i don't i don't ever want to encourage people just put up a ton of stuff and then forget about it because it's not gonna do any good if it goes bad but things like pasta that are affordable my thought process is if in two years or three years i haven't had need of that i can always donate that to a food pantry i would gladly donate a hundred dollars to a food pantry anyway and i can re-up that stock and that way i know that if a situation were to ever arise where our income was greatly stressed or there were supply issues or anything like that i've got a back up there that i can stretch meals i can stretch meats i can stretch soups with something like pasta to make sure that my family has enough to eat and that we have enough to be able to share with the people that are near to us and when it comes to stocking anything like this um i think that a very wise way to do things is when you don't need them just add a little bit so that when the situation comes up that you do need them you have them um it doesn't have to be a situation of going buying and buying all of what is at the store but if you for instance for me whenever i'm in the off season when i'm not having to do a lot of canning i'll buy a case of jars when i'm at the store even if i'm not planning on doing canning right then and then it's just an extra 10 or 12 dollars to my grocery budget rather than having to go spend 150 all at one time and it's just stretching it out and it's budgeting so you can cash flow things without it having to be like a really big hit to your budget and it's like that with anything that you think you might like to have extras of things like batteries or lighters or any of the the little necessities if ever i need something whether because there's a supply issue i can't get it or you know there have been times it's like oh man i'm out of this but it's not really in the budget to buy it right now but if i bought it when i was in the budget when i could you know have a little bit extra then i'm already prepared for that moment now the next thing that you can totally do as you turn your waiting room into a classroom is stock herbal remedies now herbalism and just natural remedies is really overwhelming for a lot of people especially people who've never really been introduced to that because they just think either that they don't work or that they're really not worth the trouble but there are so many products out there that are actually very affordable solutions that you could purchase little you know bits and pieces of stretched out over the course of time i'm not an expert by any means in herbalism so when i talk to you about the solutions that we use this is i feel like very base level in tree level herbalism but we do keep elderberry syrup stocked i keep fire cider going during this time of year um i do use essential oils especially my favorite thing to use essential oils for is especially the skin issues burns and scrapes and different things like that and all of this is really entry-level stuff and then there are a couple of brands that i can kind of turn you on to and i'm just telling you like i don't have any affiliation with these at all but this is just what's in my cabinet there is um there's a company i've just bought their stuff like on amazon or at natural food stores locally and it's called herbal farm farm i'll put it up on the screen because i can't think of it right now um but they have different things like mullion garlic oil which i used all through my kids being little to knock out ear infections and it worked better than any antibiotics that ever put them on without having to damage their gut health um there and they have all different kinds of things and you don't have to buy bulk herbs and learn how to do tinctures and all of that stuff they're already prepared and just having a stock of those i think is just a really good idea i always keep those things stocked up because you don't get a notice when one of your kids is going to get an ear infection and so it's nice to have those on hand and this is also a really great place that if you do not know a lot of stuff you can actually support people who do my friend kaylee over at the honeystead right now is really working a lot on learning herbalism i know there are so many fantastic books out there and learning this it is very in-depth so if you don't feel comfortable trying to learn it yourself support somebody who is learning it but having a little medicine cabinet of basic herbal remedies it's just a really great place to be and lastly um books i it's funny because i you know wrote my first book that was published beginning of this year i'm currently writing my second book which is going to come out next year the first time gardner came out this year and the first time homesteader is coming out next year you know whenever i first started this i had a couple people tell me don't you think books are kind of like becoming a thing of the past like with internet and and blogs and vlogs and all of this information available but i think there's something really valuable about a book i have been an avid reader and a book collector for a very long time and when i want to learn something new the first thing that i do is i go get some books about it and the reason why i like to do that is because it's just the truth and the nature of the internet is being on the internet you are um often inundated with a lot of ads and i understand like i mean part of what i do it ads is what pays me to do it and so i am not saying that this is always a bad thing obviously there's tons of information on the internet but i feel like given the nature of what we're talking about i think that there's a lot of benefit of being able to unplug from the internet and really go into a deep dive to learn with written material that's not covered in ads and interrupted by distractions and so i think getting books on these topics is just a good idea and having those things handy um the thing that i don't ever want to do is take for granted any resources that i have period um i really as someone who wants to live prepared and sustainable really focusing on regenerative agriculture where we help heal the earth and also focusing on community and sufficiency on our community and our farm efforts and being connected to my food i just don't want to take for granted that money will be there or that you know certain websites that i learned from might always be there because they might not i mean there are websites that i used to read that they're not there anymore and um you know videos what would happen truly if you know one of your favorite people to learn from deleted all their stuff or if you know if you went on to look for it and it was gone that kind of thing i know a lot of people want to take that and run with it to a really political place or a really fear-driven place and i don't think you even have to go to that place to say you know anything could happen and for me having resources that i am in complete control over is really where i want to be period across the board and so i do i encourage you guys to to get books um you can always read reviews and make sure if your your finances are limited there are really cool websites that you can go to and buy books second hand second hand bookstores i know they're not as prevalent as they used to be are a good place to go to try to find stuff like this you might even find some awesome resources that aren't in print anymore that you can get elsewhere but having a good solid library that has some instructions for the for the skills you're wanting to have and having references is just really valuable now the last thing that i want to leave you guys with um and truly this list though it is not all-inclusive by any means it's really quite a lot to be getting along with like if you're at that place of like i don't know what to do having things like this to just get started on it is it's very um it's calming and the last thing i would tell you as far as preparation goes if you're going to store something up like know what to do with it and that gives you an action point to connect to what you're doing because i think with human psychology if you start to feel afraid there's something in us that makes us wanna go okay i'm just gonna go buy stuff that's gonna make me feel better and it's not if you're if you're feeling afraid or you're feeling like you you feel that urge to be prepared you feel that urge to um to get some security in place simply buying stuff will not give you the security you want it is good to have stuff like it's good to have stuff at your disposal that you can buy all the seeds in the world but if you don't know how to garden then they are not that useful to you and i've talked to people before who in feeling the desire to prepare they bought tons and tons of heirloom seeds they're like oh i gotta have the heirloom seeds to prepare and i'm like oh have you grown a garden they're like i'll just throw them in the ground you know and while i am the first and the loudest advocate that seeds want to grow um first-time gardeners fail a lot and they grow a lot too but now is the time to have the first garden now is the time to learn things and yes have some seeds stored in a cool dry place they last a long time the sale by date on the back of seeds that is not an expiration date you can grow seeds that are several years old if you've kept them cool and dry they'll they'll largely grow but learn to grow them get some gardening books i wrote a good one for new people but grow a garden even if you are in a neighborhood even if you're in a duplex or an apartment i share all the time about green stalk towers because it gives growing space and a few square foot footprint get a kiddie pool get some tubs get some totes get some buckets put in a couple of raised beds dig up the soil put some seeds in the ground and see what happens and learn those lessons now because just a year or two of hands-on gardening experience is so massively important and i am so glad that my years of that though i had dove off into some fearful thoughts know i had dove off into some fearful communities and i did feel a sense of desire and like a real urgency to secure our food sourcing i had never seen empty groceries to ourselves and so i did not do this with the idea that i had to do it to survive there was no pressure on it and do it while there's no pressure on it and if there never is any pressure on it fantastic a garden is so worth it i will grow one for the rest of my life no matter what happens the food tastes better it's better for you it's better for the earth you know growing food in your yard and learning to eat seasonally learning to cook from scratch all these things i'm telling you to do learning to use herbal remedies building community this is healthy this is a healthy way to live no matter what is happening in the supply chains but doing it now no matter what means that if there was some interruption in the supply chain there doesn't have to be a massive interruption in your life and in your home and in your family because you're already doing this stuff and my big thing when i talk to you guys about hey get started on this now it's not because i i want you to be afraid of what might happen it's because i want you to live like this anyway it has been a massively enriching to my whole life to just live like this anyway um and and not have to feel extremely stressed by the possibility of things happening because a lot of the things that have been presented as possibilities they didn't happen and some things that get presented as possibilities they won't happen but by choosing to thrive in our life now i don't have to fear that i won't be able to survive if something happens now if we focus fully on survival i think it could cost us thriving right now but if we folk if we decide that we're just going to ignore all of it all together then i just don't think that that's wisdom so i encourage you to do what you can where you are learn the things that you can where you are apply the lessons that you can apply where you are because there is so much value in it you don't have to be afraid but you can take control and responsibility for your needs and for the needs of your family and choose to thrive right now with the confidence that that could help you if you ever were introduced to a survival situation or a situation of lack or less than you would like or any part of concern a job loss a health crisis a special needs child anything like that i want you to thrive in all of those situations so that's why i'm introducing these things to you and just posing these as things that maybe you should explore it is good to be aware of what can happen as i was just saying don't don't live don't live as if you're in the end of a movie that hasn't even played out yet right now thinking what would i do if something like this happened i'll tell you i have a plan i like to have a plan um and and it makes me feel good to have a plan but even though i could tell you what i would do with every animal on this farm if the feed store was not available and i could tell you how i would shift into cooking if the grocery store wasn't available and i could tell you exactly what i would do if x y and z scenario were to play out i don't live in the reality of those scenarios because those scenarios are not my reality i have a plan and i have the capacity and the knowledge at this point to survive and thrive no matter what the situation is but the choices that i'm making today are to make make room for the possibility of things not going how i want but i want to be present i want to go to the football game with my kid i want to sit down i want to make a special dinner for my family i want to be able to sit down and play a board game and live our life fully as it is because at the end of my life when i look back on it i want to be able to say that i was present in the current situation not afraid of the future prepared for whatever may be brought to me and living with these principles in place thinking what's the most healthy for us overall right now because ultimately what i'm responsible for is my household and my life and trying to convince other people what they should do and trying to be very concerned about the the probability of things playing out that ultimately robs me of managing well what has been put in my hands to manage so yes consider what's in your hands consider what you can do how to live your healthiest life as it is to thrive and not survive but also to be prepared in wisdom for anything that may be presented to you i hope that this encourages you i will be really focusing over the next few months is you know we're in winter we're in downtown we're getting ready to gear up and build all our gardens and bring this beautiful piece of land that we bought to life as a functioning farm but i want to i want to share with you guys the things that i've learned over the course of growing my own skills so that i could be prepared and so that i could thrive i bless you until next time

Channel: Roots and Refuge Farm

Views: 167,883

Keywords: roots and refuge, homesteading

Id: fyYCYOvmuEU

Length: 43min 9sec (2589 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021