Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Resourcefulness is Back in Style

By

Resourcefulness – (n.) The ability to come up with clever ways to solve a problem.

The bad economy hasn’t been easy for my family, or for many of my friends and neighbors. But these lean times are forcing many of us to hone an incredibly useful skill: resourcefulness.

In the last few years, my husband and I have learned to build raised bed gardens, grow vegetables, raise chickens, make bread, put up a fence, prepare delicious meals from inexpensive ingredients, fix broken faucets, remedy a variety of plumbing problems, treat a handful of minor human and feline ailments, grow and harvest herbs, and on and on. We are, by the day, becoming more resourceful people.

We learned one thing early in our roles as homeowners, cat and chicken-tenders, and parents to a little person: things will go wrong. And when things go wrong, it’s tempting to (a) feel overwhelmed (and often sorry for ourselves) and (b) tote out the Yellow Pages to look for someone to call to make things better. The problem with this approach is that it’s very expensive.

So my husband and I are learning to step back when things go wrong and ask ourselves, “How can we fix this?” This simple tactic has saved us many hundreds of dollars – in the last month alone.

But it’s done so much more than that. Tapping into our ingenuity, instead of calling someone to fix things, takes away fear. When we grow confident in our ability to solve problems – or to network with our friends and neighbors to solve problems –we stop being scared of the things that may go wrong. We start trusting that we’ll be creative and clever when we need to be, and that we can find solutions to even seemingly insurmountable problems.

Of course, we can learn much about honing our inner resourcefulness from our grandparents’ generation. They (and many generations of people before them) had to master the skill. Take these stories from Ohio’s Great Depression Story Project:

We grew all our own vegetables. We had our own orchard. We had our own cows, had milk, made our own butter, did a lot of canning. My mother at one time had over 800 jars in the basement of jams, jellies, meat, fruits, vegetables, all these different things…
– Dean Bailey, age 82

Grandma made her own bread and baked it in an open hearth oven that my Grandfather had built in their backyard. I have never tasted anything as good as that since. If there were any loaves left over by her next baking day, Grandma would make an Italian dish called ‘minestra’ – made with the cut up left over bread, beans, ham hocks and dandelion greens. This was a poor man’s meal, but very nourishing. Mom and Grandma would walk to lnterlake field to pick the dandelions used in this dish.
– Mary Rose DeMaria, age 83

For a refrigerator we used an empty gallon can with a rope tied to it, which we lowered down a dug well to sit on the top of the water. That would cool a pound of bologna… For a while before we had electricity, we heated the irons that we used to do the ironing on the cook stove. We bathed in a large wash tub that was also used to wash our laundry…
– Lester Baiman, age 82

We had no cellar to store our canned food in and my dad would make a place in the garden where he would pile up straw or hay. He would put vegetables in a pile then he would put more hay or straw on them. Then, he would put burlap sacks and old coats on top of that. He would cover it all with some soil and in the winter he could dig in it and get vegetables to eat and they kept very well.
– Charles Warrick, age 81

We raised chickens (lots of chicken and eggs were on the menu), canned our garden vegetables along with apples, pears, grapes, cherry and plums. Dandelions were our first spring greens and we welcomed them after the long winter. Mom made many casseroles, pancakes, cookies, fried donuts and fritters. Sometimes we had ice for the ice box, but we often cooled many foods in a special place in the basement.
– Marian Seilheimer, age 89

There were no disposable diapers, no paper towels and no paid babysitters. Everything was used and re-used and repaired. Nothing was thrown away. You saved buttons, nails and screws in a Prince Albert tobacco can, 1# size. It was a great day when the feed company started to put feed in pretty, printed sacks. We’d tell the men to get 4 sacks alike. That would make a dress, curtains, shirts, tablecloths, etc.”
– Margaret Smith, age 94

We lived in a couple rooms at a private residence and I remember the single light bulb hanging in the combination living room/bedroom. Mother cooked on a hot plate and washed dishes in the bathroom, which we shared. No refrigerator, only a window box to use in the winter. We never had a thought in our mind that maybe we weren’t rich. Mom and Dad always had a job and everybody laughed all the time.
– Vane S. Scott, Jr., age 85

(If you enjoyed these stories, you can read many more here.)

Are you becoming more resourceful because of the bad economy? I’d love to hear about it.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. I can’t wait to check out the other stories. My Partner and I are raising laying hens and right now have more eggs than we know what to do with! We made our first square foot raised veggie patch and plan on putting in at least one more of them, planted blueberries, kiwis, plum trees, and hope to put in an asparagus patch shortly. We’re going to be tackling some plumbing this month which IS scary but we can do it and the savings are worth it. We always have an herb garden and hopefully we can keep the critters out of the strawberries next season 😀

    • Wow! That’s great. Plumbing is so scary, isn’t it? But we’ve had success fixing a few minor plumbing issues – and it’s really so gratifying to do it yourself.

  3. What’s interesting is that I can bet for sure that one trend won’t be getting picked up again. We may (and do) start to can more, to do more home repairs, to treat minor aches and pains, to reuse and recycle…but I bet we won’t be using our dish water to take baths with, and won’t wash our clothes in that same bath water. Because one thing that’s changed drastically is the American concept of what is “clean”. And the same people that may be all about a sustainable life and small eco footprint (heck, all of us!) might get very squeamish about letting the yellow mellow (“if it’s yellow, let it mellow, if it’s brown – flush it down”) and taking a shower in “dirty” dish water….or even about waiting for clothes to get really dirty, instead of just worn once or twice, before washing them…

    • Yes, we do like things to be clean, don’t we? I think many of us are relaxing a bit in the cleanliness department, if the “no poo” craze is any indication. But I agree, I don’t see most of us bathing in lukewarm gray water, if we can avoid it.

      Your comment reminds me of this hilarious essay by Melissa Hart:

      http://www.hcn.org/issues/40.20/let-it-mellow

      • I actually did read that essay when you posted it a while ago, and wrote that quote about with the essay in mind 🙂 (and forgot to log in so it wasn’t clear that I was the one posting the comment…:) )

  4. I’m younger than those folks by a few decades, but my family did much of that in rural America too. We had an outdoor pump, which had to be carefully primed in winter so as not to break the pipes while melting the ice before pumping in the morning. All our water had to be heated. My brother got his bath first, then my sister and I sat in his gray water–about an inch of cold water by then. Mom heated clean water for herself and Dad. I don’t know if they share theirs also. We washed the clothes with a wringer washer, and all the tubs had to be filled by hand, pumped one bucket at a time from the well. If we needed hot water, it had to be pumped, then poured into the big canner on the stove to be heated.

    We had a potbellied stove in one of our houses that glowed bright red when Dad fired it up in the morning–the only heat in the house. At night we used a chamber pot. In the morning we dumped it in the privy, which we used during the day. Mom and Dad always had a vegetable garden, and the number of quarts of cherries, beans and tomatoes were the big topic of conversation among both men and women when they got together during harvest.

    When we moved out west we got to live in a “modern” house with indoor plumbing and hot and cold running water in the kitchen and bathroom. I got to take a bath by myself in clean, hot water. What luxury!

    Not something I want to give up soon, as one of your other readers alludes, though sometime in the next decade or two, very likely we will all find ourselves learning to be extremely resourceful with water, as with many necessities.

    Thought-provoking post. Thank you.

    • Thanks for sharing your experiences. You make me want to go take a hot bath – and enjoy every second of it.

  5. We are definitely more resourcefulness oriented. We’ve built a beehive and chicken coop and are in the process of populating both. The garden is growing nicely (spring here) both outside and in the glasshouse. Today I’m drying apples and tomorrow it will be beef jerky. Sauerkraut is fermenting in the pantry. Life is more fun when you do these things yourself.

  6. I’ve always said I make money so I don’t have to make things. Your post made me a bit embarrassed that I don’t find the time to do more projects around the house. There is an immense amount of pride in a job well done – especially when you are the one who did it. Thank you for that little reminder and for the lovely stories that you found.