Dabbling in Self-Reliance Before Jumping In Head First
Most people think self-reliance starts with a big jump. Buy land, plant a huge garden, get animals, and flip the switch overnight. That’s the fastest way to fail. You don’t start by betting everything on skills you’ve never tried. You start small, because every mistake costs less when the stakes are low. Dabbling is how you find out what actually works for you, what you’re willing to keep doing, and what falls apart in practice.
We didn’t buy land and turn it into a farm overnight. For nearly ten years we practiced on the edges of our life, learning piece by piece. By the time we were ready for bigger steps, the basics were already in place.
Storage Before Production
The first lesson is that food doesn’t matter if you can’t keep it. Buy potatoes in bulk and store them the way people did before refrigeration: in a cool, dark, ventilated space. See if you can keep most of them firm for weeks or months. Pay attention to what works and what fails. Do the same with tomatoes. Buy a box in season and practice canning. Store the jars and track which ones seal, which ones fail, and how long they hold on the shelf. The point isn’t to stockpile groceries. It’s to prove you can keep food without modern systems covering your mistakes.
Skills That Stick
Every household used to do this work as routine. Bread wasn’t bought, it was baked. Clothes weren’t tossed, they were patched. Scraps weren’t garbage, they became soil again. Try these things until they feel normal. Don’t just try once to see if you can. Repeat them until you know you could rely on them if you had to. Self-reliance doesn’t come from buying equipment. It comes from skills you’ve built into muscle memory.
Start Small With Growing
A garden is easy to dream about and hard to sustain. People once kept kitchen gardens not as hobbies but as steady food. Test yourself the same way. Grow a few herbs or heads of lettuce and keep them alive long enough to eat from them. Handle the watering, the weeding, the pests, and the harvest without giving up halfway through. If you can keep a small patch producing, then you’ll know what it takes to expand. If you can’t, you’ll know before you invest in more ground and more seed.
Test Your Dependence
Self-reliance isn’t only about producing food. It’s about cutting down what you need. Dry clothes on a line and live with the time it takes. Stop using paper towels and replace them with rags you wash and reuse. Store water and live out of it until it’s gone, then measure how long it lasted. Charge something with a small solar panel and see if it’s enough. These aren’t tricks. They’re tests that show you if you could keep going without the conveniences you’re used to.
Why Dabbling Matters
Dabbling turns failure into practice instead of disaster. A few potatoes lost is a lesson. A jar that fails to seal is still food you can eat first. A small garden that produces little still teaches you how much work it takes to keep plants alive. Each experiment builds experience and confidence. By the time you scale up, the basics already feel normal.
That’s how it worked for us. We spent years testing ourselves with storage, canning, growing, and basic skills. By the time we were ready for more, the foundation was solid. Moving into rabbits and quail for meat and eggs wasn’t a leap, it was the next step. And the only reason it worked was because we had already proven, in small ways, that we could keep ourselves fed without leaning on someone else’s system.
Confidence doesn’t come from reading or planning. It comes from doing, failing, and doing again until you know you can carry the weight yourself. That’s the real point of dabbling. Every small success, every small failure, builds the certainty that when the stakes rise, you won’t hesitate. You’ll already know you can stand on your own.