MAKING IT WORK.
Without electricity, gas, or running water, most everything is more difficult. Bathing, for example. Also refrigerating or cooking anything at a consistent temperature. But the human spirit is a truly inspiring entity, and you will find a way to bathe. It may take the shape of a rain barrel, a creek, a shower bag in the green house, or a pan of water and sponge in the kitchen, but bathing will happen, by God.Our solutions for what we want and need to do aren't always pretty, or entirely practical. But if we waited until we had the time and money to make a system perfect before we tried it, we would never get anything done, or we'd go broke. Most of what we do––or at least start out doing––is we make it work.Take the young turkeys living in our kitchen by the stove, for example. We don't have electricity or propane, thus we have no way to keep them warm besides the stove and a warm pan of water. It may not be ideal (nor particularly comfortable for us), but it works. Look around the farm and you will mostly see imperfect systems working perfectly fine because "making it work" for a while, is often cheaper, faster and more accessible than making it perfect from the get-go. For incubating ferments, I put a candle in the bottom of an old stove. We water all of our starts with a watering can––no hose. Refrigeration, as we've noted before, still involves a frozen jug of ice and a cooler, probably will for some time. Bailing twine holds this place together.Of course, eventually we will have running water (real, real soon, in fact!), maybe even solar electricity in the semi-near future. And we will absolutely celebrate it. But I also feel we've learned a great deal about farming and homesteading by doing the best we could with what we had first. Making it work develops your farming ingenuity. With enough money, you could start out as a homesteader with all the best fences, all the best solar and water systems, all the best animals. Or you can start out with practically nothing, work your way up to perfect systems, teaching yourself how to work with little, and how little you actually need to make anything work. You're not guaranteed success either way, but starting out poor has its advantages. It may not have been easy, but making it work definitely taught us to survive, and to appreciate water pouring freely from a faucet, or the ability to light up a room with a flip of a switch, brood turkeys under a lamp, bake bread in a consistent oven, or while I'm at it, chill a beer. The beer is key, because when we are finally set up for all these luxuries, we'll know just how special they are, and even the celebratory beverage itself will be well-earned and much appreciated.- Jesse.
