The importance of correct and working equipment.

So, today's post is a little scattered and last minute because this morning we were thinking about getting the car to the right place at the right time to get repaired within our budget. So I got to the internet this morning and said, "Shit, no blog post!" and the Lady of the House suggested the topic, so I'm running with it.

She actually suggested the importance of a car, which is a big deal. I just decided to expand it because of how often the correct tool or a working piece of equipment would make our lives much easier. The importance of a car is obvious to all of us living outside of a city like Boston, New York, or Prague. You have to have a car, or you can't go anywhere, can't get to work, can't see people. Effectively you can't live without a car in day to day life. That sort of vital necessity of a car that we are all familiar with is especially important in homesteading. It's come up all the time in our lives since we started on this mad adventure. A splitting maul makes life much more bearable

The reason the tractor photo is up top is simple, our first piece of equipment we really needed to work, and didn't have working was a tractor. With a tractor digging beds would be done by now, I could have started work on a cold storage facility, and we wouldn't have needed to buy the snow blower. But, lacking the snow blower, our first winter we lacked the proper equipment, and shoveled the driveway until our bodies gave out, and we had a sheet ice slide instead for months. There's plenty of other examples going on around the house, even right now. Having the correct shovel, and yes there is a difference. Those of you who keep up with us recognize the broken shovel. We Had to get a new shovel to keep digging garden beds because a flat nosed transfer shovel is not a round nosed digging shovel, not even a little bit. So I guess the point of this post is, make sure you spend the money to get the right tools to do what you are aiming to do, without them your life will be much more difficult! Right now, we're looking at what sorts of tools would make our lives more tenable.
1: A vehicle with more transportation space, probably a pickup truck.
2: A tractor.
3: A wheel barrow because carting around 5 gallon buckets of dirt and rocks isn't the most efficient thing ever.
4: A mattock for digging because, while shovels are great for digging, if you want to break up hard ground you use a mattock if you don't have a back hoe.

Those are really the big tools that we should have to do what we're trying to do. There's also things like rain barrels, fencing and so on that we'll need to do a lot of what we want long term, but those aren't so much tools as supplies. We'll work on the tools we need, but lack of them is definitely in the forefront of our minds right now as we try to get the plants we have in the ground before we run out of time.