Modern day conveniences have created generations of reliance. Do you rely on the grocery store for your food? What about for clothes? Do you need to go to the store to buy your cleaning products? How much food have you stashed away in case the stores really ran out?
If you answered yes to the above questions, don’t worry, most people would answer yes to at least one if not all, myself included. Now, I’m not here to tell you that this is a good or bad thing, but personally, I don’t want to rely on those big stores for my survival if the time ever came for SHTF. And these days, it’s feeling like that day is coming sooner rather than later.
In todays post I am sharing about the old fashioned skills that I would love, and need to learn in 2022.
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What are Old Fashioned Skills?
Old fashioned skills are the skills that older generations were regularly doing to survive. No one was doing it for them and there were no stores to just “swing by and pick up”.
These are skills such as gardening, preserving food, sewing and knitting, cooking food from scratch, seed saving, baking, animal husbandry, etc.
These days, most people don’t know how to make their own clothes or even cook their own food. Convenience items such as boxed foods, packaged sauces, or frozen dinners now take place of food simmering on the stove or kneading bread dough.
Am I saying having convenience items are bad? Absolutely not. Being able to pop a frozen pizza into an oven on nights when I am just too exhausted to cook or easily going shopping for a new dress is god send. But the hard fact is that we have become reliant on these conveniences and no longer know how to take care of ourselves.
Why Do I Want and Need to Learn These Skills?
Unfortunately, the days of “SHTF” seems more and more realistic and I know that my family and I are not ready. Could we survive? I would like to think so, but for how long I just don’t know.
I know how to cook over a fire, how to cook from scratch and substitute items when I don’t have what I need. Our chickens are old enough to lay eggs and I know how to butcher them if needed. We know how to start seeds and to grow food in a garden and we have solar panels for electricity. I know we could make do if we absolutely had to but there is always room for learning and improvement.
What Skills Am I Going To Learn?
So, in my journey now to what I am going to half heartedly call my “prepping journey” I am going to focus on a few skills to learn and perfect this year.
Food Preservation
There are a few ways that you can preserve your food to make it last longer for you. So far I will freeze my produce from the garden, cooked meats and sauces and even baked goods. However, you can’t freeze everything and even with extra freezers we run out of space fast. Also keep in mind that if the power goes out the freeze will eventually thaw. So, I am going to learn how to learn other ways.
Canning for example is one way I am going to learn how to preserve food. Of course, I could stock up on canned goods from the store, but with having a garden and knowing how to cook all my own food, I can easily learn how to can and save the food we regularly eat.
Food such as soups, meats, vegetables, jellies, and sauces, I would like to learn how to can. I have my eye on a Presto Pressure Canner and it’s in my cart as I type.
It has been suggested numerous times that I get my hands on this canning book as it is one of the best to learn from!
Another way to preserve food is to dehydrate it. I was always a bit puzzled as to how to you use dehydrated foods but it all makes sense after learning from fellow mamas on the gram. Simply put, you use a dehydrator to pull all the water and moisture from the food, and to rehydrate it you pour hot water over it. I know there is more to it than that but thats the basics.
Food can last decades when it is dehydrated so it is something that I would like to learn how to do to. I have heard this dehydrator is a pretty penny but absolutely worth it to those who have it. But for budget friendly people like myself, this one is a great choice.
Seed Saving
There hasn’t always been a website and pretty catalogs to look through to order seeds for your garden. At one point, the best way to ensure you had seeds for your food was to save the seeds that actually came from your food.
I think this is pretty self explanatory – take the seeds from your produce and save them – but I am going to say that there is more to it than that. So, I am going to learn how to do this when it is time to harvest my garden.
Sewing
Coming from a family that knows how to sew, you would think I would know how to by now but I don’t. I made some sweet Hawaiian print shorts in Home Economics in school but that knowledge did not stick with me. If I could do more than sew up a hole or put a button back on that would be great!
I would love to learn this skill, not because I need to but because I want to. I love searching websites for the prettiest, flowy dresses and I keep thinking how it would probably be super easy to just make it myself.
Even if this isn’t a skill that would make or break my survival, it is one that I think I should know how to do.
Soap Making
I had to edit this post because somehow I forgot one of the biggest skills that I have wanted to learn for a few years…soap making!
Summer 2021 I grew lavender and harvested so much I didn’t know what to do with it. I hung and dried a few bunches in my kitchen window and I loved it so much that some of it is still there. It’s so pretty I don’t want to take it down. My plan was to learn how to make homemade soap bars with all of the lavender I had but I never got around to it. I was however able to make some sugar scrub and gave it away as gifts for Christmas.
Ultimately, I would love to learn how to make and stock up on some homemade soap bars. What’s one nonedible thing that everyone needs? Soap! I would hate to go without that!
These are just a few basic skills that I want to learn and have on my goals list for this year. There are so many things out there that I am sure I will want to learn and have the know how in. For now, I am going to work on learning these basic ideas and move on from there.
What skills would you like to learn this year? Are these skills that I should learn that are not on this list? Feel free to add your thoughts in the comment section below or you can always follow me on Instagram @themustardseedway for daily content.
Until next time,
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