Skills over Stuff
Among our group of friends we get together and do workshops to learn and share skills. We have done apple cider pressing, planting trees on contour, and, since we have farms, we have have processed chickens and ducks.
We learn enough on the internet to get going and then figure the rest out together. We learn by doing.
The key is to Get Stuff Done. Develop Skills over just collecting Stuff.
Spreading those skills. Empowering others. Making a difference.
It transfers tribal knowledge, which is especially important to impart to the younger members.
You can have all the cool tools, or a lot of stored self sufficiency items. But that doesn’t matter if you don’t have the skills to use them. For example, you may have a nice chainsaw, but do you know how to sharpen a chainsaw rather than just go buy a new chain? (I admit that I don’t, and learning to sharpen a chainsaw is on my list of skills to learn).
Getting together and sharing skills builds community. It says “I’ve got your back”. It builds trust. And those are things that we need more of these days.
Examples of our GSD workshops:
You can see the bagged up duck meat from another workshop in the main pic.
I’ll cover this in more detail in a different post, but here we mapped out the contour for lines of trees in an orchard expansion.
And we pressed apples in the cider press and made cider. We racked hard cider from a previous year, and drank some hard cider. Compared what we liked. I took notes of what the ciders brewed with different yeasts tasted like. I started using Nottingham Ale Yeast and East Coast Ale Yeast and they give me different results in cider, mead, and vinegar.
Reach out and start your own workshops. You might find that your friends have some skills to share and you will learn some new skills.
Skills over Stuff.