Do the Best You Can with What You've Got

My birthday was last week and I had no idea what to ask for so that's what I told people. I don't know what I want. That was sort of a lie. I do know what I want. I want a new lens for my camera. I want a library full of books. I want a big garden full of plants. But none of those things are practical right now. So I don't ask for them. Instead I was blessed with a husband who knows me well. (remind me to tell you about last Christmas sometime)
He got me books. Lots of them. His sister got me books too actually. The best part is they are all books I would have probably wished for. Here they are.

I doubt I would have asked for these books right now simply because we are poor college kids lving in a rented apartment. We are far from being self-sufficient. Although I started reading The Backyard Homestead and the author says: 

Through the summer, I harvest fresh vegetables from my garden (though most of my produce comes from a local farm), forage for wild mushrooms, freeze blueberries and cherries, and can applesauce, tomatoes, and peaches. On weekends during the winter, there's almost always a pot of soup on the stove and a loaf of bread or a batch of biscuits in the oven. And as long as my local dairy farmers are milking their herd of grass-fed Canadiennes, I'll be making my own mozzarella and cottage cheese.

Ok, so I'm not harvesting a lot from my pitiful balcony garden. In fact I still haven't really planted much due to the fact that it's still snowing around here pretty regularly. I don't much care for mushrooms so I don't forage for them. However, I do can applesauce, tomatoes and peaches (all from as local as I can get it). And I am a bread and soup maker extraordinaire. While I don't do cheese I do occasionally do yogurt. So there!

This brings me to the point. I didn't think it was really practical to get all these books now since all I thought I could do about it was read and dream...and draw up plans for my imaginary garden. But I was wrong! I am awesome! Ok, maybe I'm taking it a little far here, but when I read that bit in The Backyard Homestead I realized that the point is
to do the best you can with what you've got and work toward doing more

Someday we won't be poor college kids and someday maybe we will be able to buy a bit of land and a few sheep and some bees and chickens and whatnot. But we will work our way up to that and in the meantime the knowledge that I'm gaining now will be invaluable when that time comes. What's more, if I were to just wait and wait and wait till we had the means to get started on our homestead I wouldn't have the stamina to jump into it all.


When I first started making bread I thought it was such a hassle. But it was a delicious and economical hassle so it was worth it. Now that I've been doing it nearly weekly for the last 2-ish years it's not such a big deal. It's really kind of enjoyable. Not only that, but I find it's pretty easy to whip up a batch of granola while I am doing bread. In the beginning if I had told myself I'm just going to throw together some granola as well as grind a bunch of flour and bake 4 loaves of bread I might have just thrown in the towel. A person can only do so much, right? Right! But you do what you can till that's old hat, then you do more. And so we grow. Bit by little bit.

So I am thinking that maybe I ought to make a goal to find something else I could do to grow right now in our small scale version of self-sufficiency. I'm not quite sure what yet though. Any ideas? I'll be perusing my books and thinking about it and I'll get back to you on it, but I'd love to hear some suggestions.