The delight of the rest is proportionate to the amount of work done.

Homestead Skills

Gardening, Crafts, and Other Essential Self-Sustaining Homestead Skills

Some of the pleasures of home making on the homestead are in the economy and artistic expression found in old fashioned proficiencies of spinning, weaving, sewing, canning and gardening.  More and more people in our urban, high-tech, industrialized world are reaching to the past to rediscover essential craft and agrarian homesteading skills. This movement is growing out of more than an infatuation with the peace and calm we associate with our pioneer heritage.  There is also a compelling sense of purpose and accomplishment in rediscovering and mastering these homestead skills. It is believed that this way of life and its intrinsic skills and crafts bring families together, promote time-honored values and integrity in addition to honing manual and intellectual skills. To master and practice these essential self-sustaining skills is to grow in the character required by them.  Discipline, patience, endurance, perseverance are the expected fruit.  And in moving away from dependence we regain the sense of fulfillment and accomplishment known by our forefathers.

Crafts and homesteading skills are generally associated with

areas that would, if all life were stripped of the superfluous and

reduced to essentials, prove to be the ‘necessaries’ of human

existence. So to have the knowledge of these things is to have

the knowledge of life’s essentials. In short, it is to know how to live

out the very essence of life— it is “real living.”

Craft, the Art of Work
Colloquium Press